‘Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake,” said Alfred Hitchcock. Who knew that anyone would take the knife to one of his most beloved silent films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and turn it into a vertical microdrama?

The Tattle TV app has announced that it will be streaming serial killer drama The Lodger on its phone-friendly vertical platform, telling Deadline that it is “one of the first known instances of a classic feature film being fully reframed for vertical, mobile-first consumption”. So will it set a trend? And if so, how can we stop it?

I’m only joking, of course. There will always be those who see archive cinema as just so much more content to be re-appropriated in new formats. And there will always be old-guard purists – who, me? – who wince at the thought. Still, Tattle TV, you have my attention, so let’s talk about it.

We won’t be getting this mini-Hitch in the UK, or the EU for that matter, due to rights, but lucky US viewers will be able to watch the film that Hitchcock considered “the first time I exercised my style” in a format that largely disregards that style. The Lodger will be presented with its squarish 4:3 image either extended or cut down to fill a vertical phone screen. So there will often be parts of the image missing, which is a problem.

The opening shot of The Lodger is a chilling closeup of a woman screaming, her head tilted so that her entire face fills the frame, lit from behind to emphasise her blond hair. Hitchcock told Truffaut that in The Lodger, he presented “ideas in purely visual terms”. This closeup represents the terror spreading across London as a ripper targets young, golden-haired women. Is the idea intact, even if the image isn’t? Hitchcock, a well-known stickler for carefully composed frames, may well disagree. I would.

In “microdrama” form, The Lodger’s 90-minute running time is split into chapters (the first couple are free, but to watch the whole movie, you have to pay). Hitchcock maintained that the ideal length of a feature film was “directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”, and most people can sit still for an hour and a half, especially in the hands of the master of suspense. People complain about three-hour runtimes, but Hollywood has long been trying to make short-form drama happen, with only limited success. Remember Quibi?

It is true that there are always compromises to be made in film-making, as Hitchcock well knew. As The Lodger’s leading man was Ivor Novello, probably the biggest star in British cinema at the time, Hitchcock was forced to make his ending neater, and less ambiguous than he would have preferred.

It is also true that Hitchcock happily adapted to new formats. He shot Britain’s first talkie, Blackmail (1929), and he embraced television. But if you look at the differences between the silent and sound versions of Blackmail, for example, you’ll see that Hitchcock understood that a new technology required new techniques. Maybe he would have made incredible microdramas, but as he isn’t around to do that, the format is best left to film-makers making original vertical content in the here and now.

“By repurposing British classics like The Lodger, Tattle TV aims to introduce iconic cinema to a whole new generation of viewers, bridging the gap between film history and contemporary mobile audiences,” Deadline reports. Laudable, although a cynical soul might say it’s an eye-catching announcement that will ragebait the aforementioned old-guard purists into slapping their keyboards in anger and thereby promoting the app. Oops.

But if you really want to bridge that gap, maybe remake, not simply reframe, some of the classics of early British cinema, such as the deathless trick film of combustion and dismemberment, Mary Jane’s Mishap (GA Smith, 1903), or The Big Swallow, which were at least designed to play for just a few minutes at a time, and as part of a mixed bill. Continuous performance was the original doomscrolling – possibly.

What strikes me as odd, really, is that there is no shortage of ways to watch The Lodger: on disc, or online, at a variety of prices and qualities. For American viewers, I would recommend the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, with Neil Brand’s score. We used to put up with pan-and-scan images on DVD, for example, because there was no other way to see the films at home, but that’s no longer the case. The Lodger is a repertory favourite, which plays on the big screen regularly, so you can actually watch it at the cinema, with live accompaniment, as it was intended to be seen.

Tattle’s Lodger announcement arrives after research from the University of Sussex found that scrolling social media is “the activity that brings us least joy”. And another study from the British Council discovered young people rate film and TV as far more influential than digital content. In fact, social media may perversely be thanked for encouraging gen Z back to the big screen – many credit the reviews platform Letterboxd with kickstarting a youthful cinema-going habit.

Now Tattle has given The Lodger a dose of digital Ozempic and slimmed it down to the size of a TikTok, perhaps it will provoke a few more of us to turn off our phones and see a cinematic masterpiece in full – on a screen big enough to handle it.