Even if you are none of the above, conceivably there are tricks to be learned that can translate into comic books, children’s books, radio drama, presentations, theater, and even novels. While the aspects of suspense covered in this book are primarily for the movie camera, these concepts could be utilized in almost any creative endeavor.
My hope is that you will have fun and make some awesome movies!
INTRODUCTION
YOU’VE GOT A MOVIE CAMERA and you want to learn how to keep your viewers in suspense. That’s what this book is for, and naturally we’re going to turn to the works of the Master of Suspense for guidance. After all, when it comes right down to it, that’s what director Alfred Hitchcock is famous for—making suspense with a camera.
When I travel around with my Hitchcock seminar, I tend to get a lot of filmmakers asking me for advice on their screenplays. There’s a palpable energy and desire out there for this Hitchcockian knowledge. My hope is that this book will be a guide that you can sit down with and spend time digging up the hidden suspense in your script. Oftentimes, the solution is obvious, but you first need to get past the clichéd assumptions about suspense.
That’s what this book will do. First, we’ll dispel a lot of those assumptions, and then we’ll step through the basic building blocks of suspense. We’ll start simple and keep adding the complexities chapter by chapter. Soon you’ll stumble onto “Aha!” moments that will open up your mind and spark new ways of thinking about your film project.
We’ll take the flat, two-dimensional storyline of your script and activate the audience dimension. When you begin to acknowledge the audience, share secret information with the viewers, tease them with red herrings, and provoke them to be keenly aware of your presence as the storyteller—these all bring your story to life, off the page and off the screen. The reason for this book is simple—you want your video, short film, or feature film to grab your audience, hold their attention, and keep them on the edge of their seats. You want them so enthralled by your story that they forget about Facebook and desperately follow every turn of the plot.
But suspense is just for the horror genre, isn’t it? Not at all. Many people have a misconception or a false association between the word “suspense” and knives, blood, and screaming. One reason I wrote this book was to get beyond this cliché. I even use examples from a film you wouldn’t even expect contains suspense: You’ve Got Mail. Comedies like that can have just as much suspense as Psycho.
Suspense for the camera is about luring the audience into a secret world and creating a close bond with the director. It’s different from writing suspense for a novel, because you have the added advantage of the mobile camera. Since film is primarily a visual medium, you can move the camera toward something simple in a scene, and use the space around the actor to evoke emotion. With the camera, you can point out visual plot secrets, even those that contradict the dialogue. Once the audience is lured into these secrets, you tease them with missed opportunities, close calls, and twists. The camera creates a visual dance between storyteller and audience that allows for the audience to feel engaged on a deeper level.
I fear that a lot of really talented screenwriters and directors are missing out on key storytelling techniques because they hear “suspense” and turn their mind off to what is offered. Suspense is all about the audience’s engagement with the film. All films need to engage the audience, regardless of genre.
But aren’t there already a lot of Hitchcock books out there? Yes, there are many, but while their focus is on the past, mine is written purely for the modern filmmaker. While we go back and look at old films, we make them relevant to a modern context. I include examples from recent movies as well, like The Bourne Identity, I Know What You Did Last Summer, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Captain Phillips. Be sure to read the Q&A section related to these films at the end of this book.
I do encourage you to read other Hitchcock books as resources. The interview book Hitchcock / Truffaut by François Truffaut is a great one, and it was certainly an inspiration for me early on. Sid Gottlieb’s collections of interviews and writings from Hitchcock himself are a must read for anyone trying to learn his methods—Hitchcock on Hitchcock and Alfred Hitchcock Interviews. Dan Auiler’s Hitchcock’s Notebooks is a stunning archival resource for getting into the mind of the Master of Suspense through storyboards, production letters, and transcripts of Hitchcock’s meetings with actors.
These books are all primary sources, straight from Hitchcock himself. They scratch the surface, but the whole picture is incomplete because much of what Hitchcock said to the press was for publicity rather than real advice to filmmakers. My book How to Turn Your Boring Movie into a Hitchcock Thriller was a fun attempt to fill in the blanks and add coherence to these archival texts.
There is also an endless number of academic texts that analyze Hitchcock through Freudian theory, motifs, tropes, and of course auteur theory. If you’ve ever been a film student you, no doubt, have run across some of this material.
But we need to get past all the highbrow academia and get to the true essence of how suspense is crafted for all genres. I designed this book to be an inspiration for any filmmaker out there who is ready to transform their current movie project into something ten times more compelling.
So why me?
I’m just like you—a filmmaker that wanted to learn more about creating suspense. I’ve been obsessed with Hitchcock for twenty years and counting. The first Hitchcock film I saw was Rear Window when I was fifteen. I was expecting just another boring old movie. Then as it went on I suddenly realized, “Wow, I’m really into this!” Rear Window seemed so real and hyper-present in the moment. This fascinated me.
How did Hitchcock do that? That question launched me on a lifelong journey to find the answers.
What started as a little checklist I wrote for myself while directing Offing David turned into a video, a website, and eventually grew into my docuseries Hitch20, an ebook, and then a traveling seminar. The more I did with this material, the more people flocked to it. There was a time that my little essays were getting three thousand readers per day, and when the videos went up, many times that. The eagerness for this material may come from modern filmmakers’ need to hold viewers’ attention in such a fast-paced media consumer environment.
I encourage you to watch our Hitch20 docu-series on YouTube as a companion to this book because it includes clips from many of the examples mentioned. Many of the exciting new ideas explored here came out of that series. With Hitch20, our team of filmmakers and academics picked apart each of the twenty episodes of television that Hitchcock directed. We found that each episode was a goldmine of new insights into the way Hitchcock operated. Just when I thought there was nothing new to learn from Hitchcock, this series uncovered about eighty percent of the contents of this book.
So let’s get started. Grab your script, shot lists, storyboards, and camera, and let’s dig out the hidden suspense. I’m eager to see the great films this book inspires you to create. Email me your links to [email protected].
—Jeffrey Michael Bays (October 2017)
PART ONE:
DIGGING UP THE SUSPENSE
CHAPTER 1
SUSPENSE
STORY ISN’T ENOUGH.
With so much competition out there today, and an omnipresent landscape of media outlets, filmmakers worry about one thing: How do I keep viewers (if they actually manage to start watching) engaged in my material?
The answer everyone falls back on is story. Most speculate that if you can just come up with a compelling story, then viewers will all be on board with your film. But the simple fact is, you have to have more than a good story to keep your audience.
Suspense has nothing to do with blood and knives and women screaming. Instead, it’s that thing that keeps viewers hanging on to see the outcome of your movie. It’s about connecting with your audience, making them care, making them so involve
d in your story that they can’t turn away.
Even if your creative project is a comedy skit, a music video, a sci-fi feature film, or a romantic comedy for the Hallmark Channel—you need suspense. Every story you do for an audience needs suspense.
There once was a large British man who was really good at suspense. In fact, to date, he is still the best there ever was. It has been a half century since his last film was released, yet we’re still able to learn from him. We’re still finding out new tricks from his work. When I give talks to groups of screenwriters and filmmakers, I see them light up when I mention this historic film legend.
Yes, I’m talking about Alfred Hitchcock. Most people call him Hitch for short. You’ll be hearing a lot about him in this book.
All ages seem to love Hitch, whether it be the millennial film enthusiast studying film in college, or the baby boomer that remembers growing up with his TV show as a kid.
Most all of his works of film and television still hold up today for one reason: suspense. Suspense transcends time and era, and captures that raw universal human nature in all of us. Once you learn how to use it, you’ll never look at storytelling quite the same again.
LURING THE AUDIENCE AND KEEPING THEM
Before getting the audience to feel suspense, you have to start by luring them in and keeping them. I have boiled this down to three key elements that all films must have in order to resonate with an audience. As a director setting sail on your new project, these are the three primary things you must consider: mood, momentum, and manipulation.
MOOD
Firstly, a good film captures and delivers a mood, or a series of moods. As you may have read in my book Between the Scenes, shifting moods gives the audience a satisfying emotional change as a film progresses.
It occurs to me that a great deal of film students and amateur filmmakers are driven to make films of their own because they’re chasing after something—a vague feeling or aesthetic—that they enjoyed in their favorite movies. Fan fiction, after all, is about recapturing the essence of a film you liked, say, about Star Wars or any classic film noir.
There’s something romantic about re-creating that feeling you get when a detective in a fedora hat walks down a dark alley with a cigarette. You hear a voice-over with a sarcastic macho voice telling you about how his days of crime fighting are giving him the blues. That’s not story! But that mood-setting effect has a profound impact on us. We’re already hooked. Recent psychological studies have demonstrated that when we sit down and watch a movie, our emotional state changes to emulate what’s on the screen. So yes, mood is a huge factor to consider when designing your film. Your job as a storyteller is, first, to be a mood setter.
MOMENTUM
Once you’ve established a mood, you must propel things forward and generate momentum. You may assume this means story, but that’s not the only way to get things moving forward.
Nobody ever gets onto a roller coaster and asks, “OK, what’s the story?” Of course not. There is no story on a roller coaster, but this doesn’t stop us from enjoying the ride, being jostled around safely at high speeds and letting gravity pull us forward.
In movies, momentum—that forward feeling of anticipation—is generated by various things. Here are some:
Hitchcock was able to use glances and subjective camera language to lure you into a character’s hidden secretive world.
Sexual attraction is another one—if an alluring actor is on the screen, we have a tendency to hang on to see what they do, in fascination.
There’s also the rubbernecking effect—the thing that causes people to slow down and gawk when they see an accident on the side of the road.
Comedy is another one. If someone makes us laugh, we wait to see what clever hijinks they’ll come up with next.
When a character is faced with a universally understood situation, we immediately form empathy, and wait to see how they handle it.
Creating that kinetic, forward-moving momentum keeps your audience interested in what’s coming next. They’ll hang on to find the beginnings of story, and get carried along for the ride.
MANIPULATION
Card tricks and magic acts work because we enjoy the art of trickery. Audiences love being fooled! Moviemakers, too, must grasp this art and make it their ultimate goal. You must manipulate your audience’s expectations. Use red herrings, proverbial trap doors, mirrors, sleights of hand, and other gags to get your audience to think, “I’ve been tricked, and I like it!”
First manipulate what they know, and provoke them into wondering about what they don’t know. Give your audience secret information that the characters don’t know, let one character withhold a secret from another, or mislead the audience with false information. Then, by cleverly revealing this secret in a dramatic way, you create a sense of satisfaction in the audience.
As a director you must play with the basic psychological need for closure—that compelling itch to solve a puzzle. Just one more move and it will be solved. The audience—like a mouse—when trapped in a compelling mental maze, must feel like they’re on the cusp of the exit. But then, you have to give them a surprising new way out before they reach that exit. They will love the feeling that they’ve discovered a secret door or a cheat code to get past the expected outcome.
Audiences want to be playfully manipulated and tricked. They need to feel that the movie isn’t just meandering randomly, that the events aren’t just happening “because.” Audiences need the satisfaction that someone has an intelligent plan, that there’s something profound to be learned from these events, and that the director has found a way to outwit our skepticism and make us feel it unexpectedly. If your film doesn’t manipulate, no amount of story is going to compensate.
WHAT IS SUSPENSE?
That brings us to suspense. Suspense combines those basic elements of mood, momentum, and manipulation and sets up gripping situations that make audiences squirm.
Surprisingly, the exact way cinematic suspense works has been difficult to pinpoint. Saar Klein, editor of The Bourne Identity, says, “building suspense is an intuitive process that is hard to verbalize.” Dan Trachtenberg, director of 10 Cloverfield Lane, says it’s difficult to tell when suspense is working during production. “When you’re making one of these movies none of it is scary or suspenseful while you’re shooting nor editing.” (See our interviews in Part Seven.)
American film scholar Noël Carroll, along with cognitive psychologists, has long believed that suspense is dependent on a feeling of “uncertainty” about the outcome of events. Film scholar Aaron Smuts seems to have debunked the whole idea, proving that uncertainty really isn’t a part of it at all. He and film scholar David Bordwell became skeptical while trying to solve the Paradox of Suspense by examining the fact that repeated viewings don’t have a diminished effect on the feelings of suspense. In some instances suspense even increases the second time a film is watched. The motel office scene in Psycho (1960), for instance, between Marion Crane and Norman Bates becomes much more suspenseful for those who have already seen the film and know the outcome (Smuts).
But Bordwell postulates that suspense is more of an instinctual reflex in our autonomic systems—that because suspense calls upon emotional instinct rather than our higher reasoning, we experience it the same each time regardless of plot spoilers. So rather than being uncertain about an outcome, we simply get a tickle of the funny bone each time we are exposed to a suspenseful scene.
Perhaps that explains why football fans can record a game and then watch parts of it over again later. It would seem that certain unique moments of a game are enjoyed on repeat viewings simply because of their uniqueness, not based on knowledge of the final score. The fact that these unique moments will never occur again in future games in quite the same way makes them special enough to watch over and over again.
So if it’s not about uncertainty, then what is it about? Aaron Smuts says there’s more to it, that suspense is actually
a frustration in the viewer, frustration that we can’t change the outcome. We can’t step in and help when things are going down the wrong path. Back to football—all you can do is cheer or yell at the TV.
This explains why the most suspenseful Hitchcock scenes are moments where no one helps, and the audience is reminded that they are also unable to help. We’re forced to watch and wait—in suspense.
A nearby policeman doesn’t try to rescue Alice while she’s being raped in Blackmail (1929).
We can’t stop the brakeless car from speeding down the winding hill in Family Plot (1976).
We can’t help Bruno pick up the lighter he’s dropped down the storm drain in Strangers on a Train (1951).
That last one is especially interesting, because we feel suspense even when the antagonist (the bad guy) needs help succeeding. Hitchcock was able to call upon our rescue instinct and create situations where we are helpless to intervene. This feeling of frustration is a big part of suspense, and of our enjoyment of it. Somehow it’s entertaining for us to have these feelings provoked while watching a movie.
So, in essence, suspense is about provoking that rescue instinct in all of us. When we see someone stepping in front of a bus, or a child chasing a ball in front of a car, or a dog trapped in a river—we want to reach out and save them.
I take this a step further in my docu-series Hitch20, saying that the key to suspense is to set up secrets within the story that mustn’t be found out by the other characters. Pitting these characters against each other on the cusp of revealing the secret—that’s where we get suspense. I’ll have more things to add to this definition of suspense as we go on. But first, a word about the difference between tension, drama, and suspense.
Suspense With a Camera Page 2
