Suspense With a Camera

by Jeffrey Michael Bays

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

    Rear Window (1954)—first few minutes.

    Ford Startime, “Incident at a Corner,” Season 1, Episode 27 (1960)

    10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Dir. Dan Trachtenberg—opening titles.

  FURTHER READING

  Bays, Jeffrey 2013. How to Turn Your Boring Movie into a Hitchcock Thriller. Borgus Productions.

  Leitch, Thomas 1991. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games, University of Georgia Press, Athens.

       CHAPTER 9

      LURE THEM WITH A HITCHCOCKIAN OPENING

  It must always be remembered that the primary aim of pictures is to provide entertainment. To entertain people, one must first capture their interest.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  AS YOU LEARNED in the previous chapters, your audience should be involved in a game of watching rather than just passively viewing. Adding personality to the camera is a big way of awakening the bond between director and audience. There’s no better time to start doing this than in your opening sequence. While it may be effective later in your movie as well, the sooner you teach the audience about the game of watching, the more effective your suspense will be.

  THROUGH PUBLIC & PRIVATE SPACE

  Movement of the camera through geographic space is one way to signal to the viewer that a new story is being uncovered. Your camera can begin by scanning a public space, luring the viewer from an objective vantage point and calling upon their voyeuristic nature.

  Remember the woman-stealing-wallet example from chapters 4 and 5? The opening shot of that scene could be treated as if it’s following a random woman walking through a crowded beach. The camera arbitrarily decides to follow her instead of anyone else in the crowd. As the camera follows her inside the house, we are given a secret view into a private world.

  Hitchcock commonly used this voyeuristic camera move in the openings of his films, panning toward a private area and intruding. In the case of films like Rebecca (1940)—repeated in openings of Psycho (1960), Dial M For Murder (1954), Secret Agent (1936), and others—Hitchcock’s camera begins wide on the landscape and moves or pans through the environment in search of a story. Rebecca begins with the moon shining through dark rolling clouds, as the camera tracks between the bars of an iron gate. Crossing into private territory, it moves down a driveway surrounded by trees, and soon the camera arrives at an old deteriorated mansion, tracking further around the mansion until it moves in on a window.

  In Psycho we pass through a crack in the window curtains and enter the hotel room where a couple is getting dressed. Here Hitchcock opens across the Phoenix cityscape, getting closer to the buildings in sequential shots, as if picking out a random window to peer into.

  I’ll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  It is this free-ranging camera that makes its way more subtly into the opening of films such as Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder, and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), all of which pan from sunny city street and cross through a window to reveal the private space inside.

  Opening with a tracking or panning shot like this immediately makes the audience feel special. We feel privileged to have access to secret information and that the director has singled us out. We immediately feel that there is a storyteller actively taking us on a secret tour that no one else sees.

  LANDSCAPE & CROWD CARICATURES

  If you do choose to start your film in a public space, it will either be empty or filled with crowds of random people. These people should be just as compelling as the main characters of your film. By activating a Where’s Waldo? type of curiosity, your audience feels that each of these people could have separate movies about them as well. Once the camera finally does get to the protagonist, we feel even more privileged to have access to this specific person. Something about them must be profound enough to choose them out of all these other fascinating people. If only your camera had chosen to follow another one of them, another equally interesting movie could have unfolded.

  In the Hitchcockian style, each one of those extras should be comical, ironic, and contain their own interesting stories. The comic Hitchcock landscape is populated by uniquely stylized crowds, portraying the everyday citizen in a rich array of caricatures. An elderly woman glares disapprovingly and a young man whistles suggestively at Tippi Hedren as she crosses the street in the opening of The Birds (1963), subtle indications that—we later learn—she has a history of public indecency.

  This fine level of detail goes back to Hitchcock’s first British film, The Lodger (1926), showing a frantic woman recalling a story to the policemen and curious onlookers tipping their heads forward to hear the news. The 39 Steps (1935) opens in an auditorium of people gathered to stump Mr. Memory. Hitchcock gives each person a close-up as they take turns asking ridiculous questions, allowing a rich tapestry of personalities to surface.

  Hitchcock’s extras aren’t just generic members of a crowd, they are individuals with their own agendas. We see traders cutting raw fish on the docks in The Manxman (1929), bored factory workers on an assembly line in Saboteur (1942), and physicists tapping grumpily with their forks at the frozen wine on a cruise ship in Torn Curtain (1966).

  Grandmothers in feathered hats make frequent crowd appearances, like the woman at the train platform in Rich and Strange (1932) losing balance on her feet whilst the tight crowd steps back and forth in unison. On the train a man accidentally grabs the feather on her hat and pulls it off while the train sways; she glares and swipes it back from him. Similarly, the crowds at the beginning of North by Northwest seem to walk in unison down the stairs to the subway; a woman tries to get into a taxi before another woman swats her away.

  The bus in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955) is packed with tourists: a blonde in sunglasses, a Frenchman, and various veiled Muslims. As we peer down onto the street in Rope, we see a woman pushing a baby carriage, another woman sweeping stairs, a man carrying a briefcase, and a policeman escorting two children across the street. Rear Window (1954), of course, is filled with a tapestry of comical extras which weave their way into James Stewart’s conspiracy.

  Lifeboat (1944) opens with objects taking the place of people as Hitchcock pans across various items floating in the water from a sunken ship: a New Yorker magazine, playing cards, a checkerboard, and eventually a floating dead body. Dead bodies make frequent appearances in the openings of Hitchcock films, including Lifeboat, Frenzy, Young and Innocent, The Lodger, and The Trouble With Harry.

  Presenting such an interesting crowd not only immediately sparks curiosity in the viewer, it also cues the command and control of the storyteller picking out one person to follow. It’s all part of teaching the audience about the game of watching.

  FACETIOUS & WHIMSICAL TONE

  A comical crowd also starts the film in a fun way, rather than opening with a dreary, dark, spooky environment that would be predictable for a suspense story. Hitchcock believed that all suspense films should begin as comedies (Gottlieb).

  In the early part of his career Hitchcock wrote about the need for shifts in tone throughout a film, and that a comic opening is essential to suspense. He said, “in a light-hearted setting, the advent of drama is made all the more effective by its unexpectedness … The more happy-go-lucky the setting, the greater kick you get from the sudden introduction of drama.” He saw around him that British films had one single tone throughout, yet noted many theater plays had comic first acts which he referred to as “perfect coating with which to sugar the plot-planting pill.” In Film Weekly he explained:

  After all, that is how things happen in real life. Although a tragic event may be destined to happen sometime during the afternoon, we do not go about all the morning with somber faces. We just don’t know that the catastrophe is coming—consequently, when it does arrive, we are as likely as not to be laughing and drinking in complete light-hearted
ness.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Gottlieb)

  The consequences of not having this contrast between comedy and drama in a film, he said, resulted in a lack of freshness and “unrelieved tension.” The drama had no room from which to rise to a dramatic climax. He believed these shifts in mood serve to keep the audience interested and, more importantly, to convey the impression that the characters are first “really alive,” leading the viewer then to be drawn into their dramatics (Gottlieb).

  A survey of his body of work reveals a growing trend, emerging in his first sound pictures, and especially prevalent in his American period, that a majority of his suspense films opened in the bright daylight accompanied by playful music. With the exceptions of Young and Innocent (1937), Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940), The Wrong Man (1956), and Family Plot (1976)—all of which begin at night—his films tended to open in the afternoon. Even then, in Rebecca for instance, the night is immediately juxtaposed by bright sunshine in the next scene, at the beginning of the flashback in which a suicidal man is about to jump from a cliff.

  Young and Innocent dissolves from an opening scene in a storm with violent lightning surrounding a couple arguing, to a bright sunny beach in which the woman’s body washes up on shore.

  Probably the most obvious example of a bright opening is in The Trouble With Harry (1955), showing beautiful autumn scenery of orange leaves, rolling Vermont hills, and a church. Then an innocent child skips along and stumbles onto a dead body lying on green grass.

  COMICAL MUSIC

  Much of Hitchcock’s musical introductions tread almost absurdly toward the juvenile, with bouncy flutes and whopping bass tubas, as if he wanted to appeal to our childlike nature. This counterpoint of triviality and danger is fully articulated when gunfire disrupts the auditorium in the opening of The 39 Steps (1935), and the stage band plays happy music to calm the crowd.

  Even with more dramatic films such as Rear Window and Dial M for Murder, he opened with a facetious music score, this same childlike peek-a-boo tone recalling his tendency toward audience trickery. Hitchcock openly teases, tickles, and plays with the audience from the very outset of his films, much like one would to a baby (Gottlieb).

  If you decide to use some Hitchcockian elements in your opening sequence, you’re sure to start curating that playful, adversarial bond with your audience. By opening with a fun excursion from the everyday world into a private, secret space, you’ll have them primed for a wild ride of suspense. With continued anthropomorphic camera moves, obvious edits, and perhaps a fun cameo, your audience will be fully aware of the roller coaster you’ve built for them. They’ll enjoy every twist, turn, loop, and red herring, and giggle at your cleverness as a suspense storyteller.

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

    Rear Window (1954)—opening sequence.

    Frenzy (1972)—opening sequence.

  FURTHER READING

  Bays, Jeffrey 2004–14. Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock, website, Borgus.com.

  Chatman, Seymour 1978. Story and Discourse, Cornell University Press, USA.

  Condon, Paul and Sangster, Jim 1999. The Complete Hitchcock, Virgin Publishing Ltd., London.

  Duncan, Paul 2003. Hitchcock: Architect of Anxiety, Taschen, Holenzollernring 53, Italy.

  Gottlieb, Sidney 1995. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, University of California Press, USA.

  Smith, Susan 2000. Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, British Film Institute, London.

  Truffaut, François 1984. Hitchcock by Truffaut: The Definitive Study, Grafton Books, London.

       PART FOUR

      THE SOUND OF SUSPENSE

       CHAPTER 10

      BUILDING A SOUNDSCAPE

  BECAUSE SUSPENSE RELIES on such an intense involvement from the audience, sound is a way to enhance that experience and manipulate the viewer for maximum impact. In cases like the basement scene in Hitchcock’s TV episode “Four O’Clock” or the song sung by Jo (Doris Day) at the end of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the suspense wouldn’t be possible without sound. In fact, the scenes wouldn’t work at all. As Paul intently listens to the footsteps on the floor above in hopes someone will come toward the stairway door and rescue him, suspense is generated around the progress of the footstep sounds. As Jo sings her song, hoping to cue her kidnapped son to start yelling for help, suspense is generated around whether the son will notice the song, and whether she will hear his response and expose his captors to the crowd below.

  Sound in a film is really a third dimension that brings depth to a flat screen. It provides continuity between shots, smoothes out the abruptness of editing, and allows the viewer to become immersed in a fictional world.

  Your soundscape can be completely accurate to reality, or it can be manipulated to emphasize certain objects in a scene and deemphasize others. It can be dropped low in the sound mix in favor of dialogue, or it can be purposefully loud to become dominant and overpowering. Sound can be removed entirely to provide a spotlight on the music score, or to shock the audience with nothingness.

  Any choice about what to do with the sound should be made from within the needs of the story and audience. The goal of the sound designer should never be to precisely recreate what a microphone would hear from the camera’s viewpoint. The soundscape is a dynamic, living and breathing part of the storytelling machine. It is manipulated to emulate the subjective viewpoint of a character’s mind, or to draw the audience’s attention to something.

  It’s ironic that early films are called “silent” because those films (made until the 1930s) were screened with musical accompaniment, often performed live at the cinema. There was nothing silent about that moviegoing experience. By today’s standards silent-film music was probably overpowering and distracting, but served the important purpose of filling in the blanks of a film completely absent of a soundtrack.

  It’s very difficult to actually watch a completely silent movie for any great length of time. The absence of sound or music forces the mind to work hard to pay attention and, over time, it gets fatigued.

  The addition of the strip of soundtrack to film stock in the late 1920s changed everything. Hitchcock was among the first in the world to direct a “talkie” picture, a nickname for films that included audible dialogue. The soundtrack opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities and Hitchcock jumped on board with experimentation in his film Blackmail (1929).

  Blackmail pioneered the use of silence as a dramatic device. Moments that may have traditionally included music could now be made intentionally silent. Ambient sounds could be added to abstract the reality, to push the protagonist, and to let us hear what Alice’s delusional mind hears.

  Just like Hitchcock did in his first sound film, today’s filmmakers should always consider the power of sound in conveying the story to the audience. Here’s what sound can do to enhance suspense:

    Background ambient sound becomes part of the story.

    Exaggerate a sound to emphasize something in the narrative.

    Increase tension through both ambient noises and silence.

    Manipulate knowledge among the Triad of Secrets (see chapter 2).

    Withhold a sound from the viewer to pique curiosity.

    Characters make noises instead of speaking.

    A character must listen closely for important information.

  BACKGROUNDS

  As you read this, there might be a train whistle, barking dog, or neighbor’s music in the background distracting you from concentrating. It’s the same in a film. Sounds in a film’s backdrop can distract the audience from the story and keep them from understanding important events. Conversely, these sounds can be carefully crafted to clarify the narrative and enhance the viewer’s concentration. They can help keep the audience’s attention fine-tuned and focused on the progression of events.

  Among even experienced filmmakers and screenwriters, sounds that are part of the setting are often not
even thought about at the script stage or even the directing phase. It’s not until the editing room—and maybe even the final sound mix—that consideration is made on how to fill in that space. You shouldn’t wait that long, because you might have missed a great opportunity to tell the story through sound.

  Here’s a perfect example of that. Hitchcock’s TV episode “The Horse-player” (1961) is about a church that needs to raise money to fix its leaky roof. Now, imagine that’s your story. How do you convey to the audience through sound that the church should raise money to fix the leak?

  Think it through. A leaking roof means water is dripping in. When does it drip? When it rains. Here’s what Hitchcock did. He opened the episode without any music. It begins at a church service, as the congregation is sitting in the pews. We hear loud rain spattering on the roof, and at times the loud dripping sound as water drops onto people’s heads. The rain is so loud that we can barely understand what the priest is saying.

  As rain drips onto heads, people look up at the ceiling in disgust. We cut to the ceiling, and watch it drip.

  “The Horseplayer” is a perfect example of how background sound can become the dominant storytelling device. The sound of the rain becomes so intrusive to our viewing experience that we immediately understand when the priest says he wants to raise money to fix the roof. The plot setup is immediately clear.

  Using intrusive background sounds was a key strategy Hitchcock used to increase tension. Bustling street noise and car horns represent the outside world, and when a door opens that sound spills into the room. If the protagonist is feeling guilty and hiding a secret, he may be affected by hearing that noise. The outside world intrudes into his secret space and raises his guilt. This world also carries with it an attitude toward the protagonist, coming alive and reacting to what he has done.

  In Blackmail, Alice is feeling guilty that she has murdered a man. As she makes the long walk home, she passes clubs full of laughing people. Car horns seem to honk at her mockingly, increasing her dismay. When she gets home, the songbird in her bedroom chirps wildly. These comical sounds seem to belittle her tragedy, and their insistence toward happiness produce an irony that helps bring out Alice’s sadness. The contrast helps us internalize her feelings.