Alfred Hitchcock's stamp on Hollywood is hard to overstate. Over his fifty years in the film industry making masterpieces like Notorious and North by Northwest, he so perfected the thriller that the genre now bares the adjective "Hitchcockian." In honor of his 109th birthday, let's check out some of the best Hitchcockian thrillers directly inspired by the Master of Suspense.

Photo by DreamWorks/Kobal, WireImageCollateral

Hitchcock loved chucking an ordinary guy into a steaming pile of trouble. Think Strangers on a Train or North By Northwest. Michael Mann steals a page from the master's playbook with this taunt thriller about a normal cabbie who gets the world's worst taxi fare - Tom Cruise.

Photo by Orion Pictures, Everett CollectionDressed to Kill

Brian DePalma has worshipped more at the altar of Hitch than perhaps any other filmmaker. In "Dressed to Kill," he riffs on the master's most famous flick - Psycho - featuring not one but three shower scenes and Michael Caine in a dress.

Photo by Universal, Everett CollectionMulholland Drive

Beneath the surreal bits with tiny senior citizens and malevolent cowboys, Mulholland has many of the same trademarks as director David Lynch's favorite film Vertigo - a prim blonde swapping identities with a brunette bombshell and a storyline that makes a bizarre left turn halfway through the flick.

Photo by Sony Pictures, Everett CollectionThe Spanish Prisoner

No Spaniards or prisons here. Instead, David Mamet, like Hitchcock, creates a brightly lit world filled with attractive, pleasant-seeming people who will stab you in the back in plain daylight. Similar to the woozy paranoid feel of The Man Who Knew Too Much but without Doris Day.

Photo by Gramercy Pictures, Everett CollectionBound

Before the geektastic hipness of the Matrix, the Wachowskis cranked out this taut crime thriller about two lesbians plotting the perfect crime. Switch the leads from ex-cons to upper crust and the genders from female to male and you have a storyline similar to Hitch's 1948 opus Rope.

Photo by ParamountDisturbia

Rear Window influenced scores of thrillers ranging from Misery to Body Double to the French thriller Cache. But Disturbia is a full on Gen-Y remake with Shia LaBeouf filling in for Jimmy Stewart and a court-ordered ankle bracelet subbing for a broken leg.

Photo by Universal/Kobal, WireImageJaws

Hitchcock terrorized a sleepy West Coast town with a mysterious murder of crows in Birds. In Jaws, Spielberg terrorizes a picturesque East Coast town with a ravenous white shark. Less surreal, perhaps, but just as scary. There's even a dash of Lifeboat, Hitch's tale of watery isolation, in the last third of the movie.

Photo by DreamWorks/Kobal, WireImageMatch Point

In Dial M for Murder, a former tennis player plots to murder his beautiful blonde wife for the insurance money. In Match Point, a former tennis player plots to murder his beautiful blonde mistress to ensure he keeps his wife's money. The moral: watch your back around a man who's good with a racket.

Photo by Paramount/Kobal, WireImageMission: Impossible 2

If you look past the wicked cool explosions and Tom Cruise's luxuriant hair, the plot line of MI2 is pretty much identical to Hitchcock's Notorious. In both films, a hunky spy convinces a beautiful woman he loves to seduce the baddie who threatens the world with some spectacularly awful weapon.

Photo by DreamWorks/Kobal, WireImageWhat Lies Beneath

Robert Zemeckis directs this love letter to Hitchcock with clear references to Psycho and Rear Window. And while this flick might have the taut suspense of Hitch's films, he would have probably frowned at the supernatural twist ending.