• A Night at the Movies: The Suspenseful World of Thrillers, 8-9 p.m. Friday, Turner Classic Movies

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that Norman Bates isn't about to burst out of the bedroom and slice you like a Benihana filet.

``A thriller confirms your paranoia about the world,'' explains screenwriter Heywood Gould. ``It confirms your worst suspicions. People are after you . . . people are plotting against you.''

Gould is one of a score or so of Hollywood veterans offering insightful and witty commentary in Turner Classic Movies' A Night at the Movies, a hugely enjoyable documentary on suspense film.

With no ambition to be definitive, and no appetite for film-school quarrels over stuff like where you draw the line between thrillers and horror flicks, A Night at the Movies is just free-wheeling fun in which the interviews sometimes reveal more about the filmmakers than the films they're talking about.

What does it tell us, for instance, that screenwriter Diablo Cody's mom forced her to watch Psycho when she was just a little kid? (Cody, assuming that a black-and-white movie would be a stuffy exercise in classicism, was delighted to discover that it scared her head off.) Or that Martin Landau decided to play his creepy and murderous character in North by Northwest as gay on a personal whim rather on instructions from director Alfred Hitchcock? (``Hitchcock never said a word to me,'' reveals Landau.)

Even with its occasionally scattershot approach, though, A Night at the Movies deftly traces the suspense genre from its repressed psychosexual roots (Hitchcock's silent 1927 Jack-the-Ripper saga The Lodger, the documentary argues, was the first full-blown thriller) into the 1980s, when imitators like Brian De Palma could flaunt blood and boobs in ways that Hitchcock could only (queasily) dream about.

Among the most interesting threads in A Night at the Movies is the changing nature of the villains. If thrillers track our paranoia, as Gould says, then the shifting identity of the genre's bad guys reveals much about our national insecurities. In Hitchcock's films of the 1940s and '50s, the villains were frequently powerful businessmen or social dandies. In The Manchurian Candidate, one of the great thrillers of the Cold War 1960s, the presidential assassin has been brainwashed by Red Chinese; in The Parallax View, in the post-Watergate '70s, he's been brainwashed by our own government.

And in the 1980s and beyond, he frequently turned into she, from the bunny-boiling Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction to the baby-and-husband-snatching Rebecca de Mornay in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.

The wages of feminism, it seems, are death.

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