Suspense With a Camera

by Jeffrey Michael Bays

The door key in Dial M for Murder (1954) is the piece of evidence that inevitably convicts Tony. Characters are moving and hiding keys all over the place, and it’s a great shell game. But the real suspense is around whether Inspector Hubbard can trick Tony into slipping up and revealing his role in the murder. The key could be any object. It’s just a MacGuffin.

  The MacGuffin is the reason behind everything happening, but once the audience finds out, they don’t really care. It’s like the wild card. It’s x in the algebraic formula of story. It can be anything. Change x to something else and the story stays the same.

  That’s not to say that story isn’t important. Writers must be clever in what they present, and it should all make sense. But once you get that story framework in place, it can all be changed at any time, because the thrust of your movie is the style of presentation, not the content.

  Hitchcock compared this to an artist painting a portrait of a basket of apples. Someone comes along and starts worrying about whether the apples he’s painting are sweet or sour. “Who cares?” asked Hitchcock. “It’s the style and manner that he’s painting them—that’s where the emotion comes from” (Schickel). Filmmaking is just like painting in that way, in that it’s the style of screen presentation that creates the emotion.

  In Part Five we explored the use of detail that can be sharpened to increase clarity and tension. In Part Six we’ll step back and look at the space around the actor, and how that space and environment can be manipulated to increase suspense.

  FURTHER READING

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

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

  Borgus Productions. Condon, Paul and Sangster, Jim 1999. The Complete Hitchcock, Virgin Publishing.

  Gottlieb, Sidney 1997. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Los Angeles.

  Schickel, Richard 1973. The Men Who Made the Movies: Hitchcock, The American Cinematheque TV series.

       PART SIX

      PLAYING WITH SPACE

       CHAPTER 17

      LOCATIONS THAT PUSH STORY

  A rule that I’ve always followed is: Never use a setting simply as a background … You’ve got to make the setting work dramatically. You can’t just use it as a background. In other words, the locale must be functional. All backgrounds must function.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Gottlieb)

  WHEN IT COMES TO DIRECTING, the space around an actor is equally as important as their face. Australian film scholar Adrian Martin describes the art of film as simply “bodies in space.”

  The sky, ground, and architecture surrounding your characters is an essential tool for increasing the feelings of tension and suspense. Whether you manipulate the environment itself to push the story, or put the camera in a place that elicits anxiety, dramatic space is vital in making your audience feel engaged in your story.

  Locations are useful to suspense for three reasons:

    1. To embellish an underlying mood that either coincides with—or starkly contrasts with—the scariness of the situation.

    2. To push back against the characters, prevent them from reaching their goals.

    3. To become an antagonist personified.

  When I say “location” in this chapter, I’m referring to the environment, buildings, cars, extras, animals, and everything else contained within a space that can be summoned for dramatic purposes.

  Suspense and locations share a symbiotic relationship. When you think of Hitchcock’s greatest suspense scenes, you might think of museums, national monuments, windmills, trains, buses, tennis courts, movie theaters, streets filled with crowds, or even an empty field. These settings are diverse, usually in public spaces, and often in broad daylight.

  Hitchcock liked to break the cliché and get away from the dark, stormy night with howling wolves that most people associate with suspense. That’s why he often chose the opposite—bright sunny locations—to prove that scary things can happen during the day as well.

  TO ENHANCE CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  Designing the set space to be unnaturally small can help create a claustrophobic feeling. Add some oversized props and it can feel like the setting is overpowering the characters. With dolly shots tracking to one side, the parallax effect of these objects moving against the room and its inhabitants helps increase this uncomfortable feeling even further.

  In Hitchcock’s TV episode “Banquo’s Chair” (1959), Hitchcock used props like candelabras partially intruding into the camera space to obstruct the view of the actors. This enhances the feeling of the antagonist’s hidden guilt and his sense that the haunted house is pressing down on his conscience.

  In Hitchcock’s TV episode “Lamb to the Slaughter,” the design of the set allows for long tracking shots as Mary dramatically walks through her home. As she is arguing with her husband in the living room, she turns away and walks through the kitchen and into the garage to grab a frozen leg of lamb. Then she walks all the way back through the space to hit her husband over the head with it.

  Later, this long, deep set allows for some interesting compositions putting the oven (where the lamb is cooking) in the background between two detectives mid-ground, with Mary in the foreground nervously listening. And the episode finishes with a notable tracking shot into Mary’s laughing face, as she gets away with her crime.

  A FLAT WASTELAND

  Even a flat, empty terrain can cause a claustrophobic feeling. Consider a field of dead prairie grass and corn stalks, with the afternoon sun shining bright. A straight highway and intersecting dirt road both stretch into the horizon in all directions. A small crop-duster airplane flies in the distance.

  How do you create suspense in this empty environment? Find something that is part of the setting—the airplane. It begins flying over the protagonist, Thornhill (Cary Grant), and its pilot shoots bullets at him. That’s the setup for the famous crop-duster scene in North by Northwest (1959).

  To further utilize the setting, where can the protagonist hide from the pilot? He attempts to flag down passing traffic. That doesn’t work. Of course not, it’s a Hitchcock film—bystanders never help. He can hide within the dead corn stalks. The chess game continues as the pilot sprays the corn with poisonous pesticide, forcing Thornhill out of hiding.

  Every element of suspense in this scene comes as part of the setting. Tension is increased when the setting and its inhabitants push back.

  SUSPENSE IN A CROWD

  Probably the most compelling reason for putting suspense out in the sunshine, aside from breaking the cliché, is to emphasize that no one helps in a crisis, not even the police. Depending on the secret being hidden, you might not want those bystanders to know. Flaunting the secret out in the open allows you to build suspense around its inevitable exposure.

  When Thornhill is trapped in a public auction in North by Northwest, he is being pursued by the criminals in charge of the auction. They have blocked the exits with guards that would grab him if he tried to escape. No one in the crowd realizes what is going on, but Thornhill figures out an ingenious way to use their ignorance to his advantage.

  How can Thornhill escape an auction? By bidding. He yells wildly overpriced bids and heckles the proceedings, causing such an uproar that he punches someone nearby. That gets him arrested by the bumbling police, and hauled away to safety, right past the guards who helplessly stare at him on his way out.

  Hitchcock used the setting of the auction to function as part of the suspense. Take a look at the Triad of Secrets for the North by Northwest auction scene:

    Thornhill knows a secret.

    The criminals know a different secret.

    The crowd/police knows nothing.

    The viewer knows more than everyone else.

  The scene plays upon feelings of embarrassment as the criminals hope their cover isn’t blown. Thornhill was able to maneuver his way into poli
ce custody by embarrassing himself in front of a crowd, and still without revealing any secret. It’s a complex web of threats and embarrassments that makes the scene deliciously entertaining.

  SETTING DELAYS THE ACTION

  The setting and its inhabitants can distract, block, or delay the protagonist and increase their feeling of anxiety. This, in turn, can increase our empathy for them. When the policeman stops Marion (Janet Leigh) in Psycho and begins questioning her, she gets more nervous and our empathy rises.

  As mentioned in chapter 14, comedy tends to work best in these situations because if you didn’t allow the viewer to laugh, the distractions could become blatantly annoying. Annoy the audience during a tense sequence and you might lose them. Laughter is a great companion to suspense—just like the enjoyment of a roller coaster. It creates a playful frustration in the audience, and forces more intense concentration on the important events in the scene.

  Think of everything that could go wrong on your morning drive to work. A tire could go flat, you could face road construction, an extra-wide vehicle prevents you from using the passing lane, a train gets stuck on the tracks at the intersection, the police have set up a drug test, your engine light comes on, the truck behind you drives too close, the traffic light is broken … You see where I’m going with this.

  Now, think of everything that could go wrong once you get to work. The coffee machine is broken, the water tank is out of water and no refills are available, the restroom is blocked off for cleaning, the snack machine doesn’t take your money, your computer has to reboot to install updates, your password doesn’t work …

  Now, think of everything that could go wrong when you get home for the evening. A light bulb burns out but is too high to reach, the cat is missing, ants have invaded the cupboards, you receive a threatening letter in the mail, your phone keeps ringing but when you pick up there’s no answer, your TV reception is bad, you stub your toe …

  Now, think of everything that could go wrong once you’ve gone to bed and turned out the light …

  I’ve probably created tension in you just by writing this. These elements are the “palette of worry” for your directing paintbrush. These are the ingredients of building tension into your movie scenes. Bringing them in to block your hero is the equivalent of pulling back a crossbow so it gets tighter and tighter.

  The reason we do this in cinema is to make the important story elements of your scene stand out. The audience now cares much more about our hero’s pursuit, deep down, because we have made it harder for him to succeed.

  By the same token, if you want to emphasize a line of dialogue, distract the audience with a stray sound. A maid comes along, for instance, with a loud vacuum cleaner just as something important is being said. The viewer has to strain to make out what is being said, and then of course remembers it.

  ANTAGONIST PERSONIFIED

  Your setting may even become so powerful that it becomes a character in the story, or even the antagonist. At a ski resort in the Alps, a glacier becomes a character in Hitchcock’s TV episode “The Crystal Trench” (1959). A man slips and falls into the glacier and is frozen alive. His wife waits forty years for the glacier to thaw and reveal his preserved body. Hitchcock frames the glacier in the backdrop throughout the film, reminding the audience of its looming presence over events.

  In William Dickerson’s Detour (2013), the mudslide envelopes the protagonist’s car. The mud becomes the antagonist as the thing that is trapping him and slowly creeping in to suffocate him. (See Q&A with William Dickerson in chapter 23.)

  Lifeboat (1944) is a film set entirely on the ocean. During tense moments, the weather boils up and becomes windy, throwing the lifeboat on the verge of capsizing. There’s a key scene where the boat’s occupants must amputate an injured man’s leg, and the storm provides the wobbling that makes the procedure that much more tense. Later, another storm brews up right as the key secret is revealed, turning the tables and giving the antagonist all the power.

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Banquo’s Chair,” Season 4, Episode 29 (1959)

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” Season 3, Episode 28 (1958)

    Lifeboat (1944)

  FURTHER READING

  Bays, Jeffrey 2014–17. Hitch20, web-series,YouTube.

  Gottlieb, Sidney 2003. Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, University Press Mississippi, Jackson, p.128.

  Markle, Fletcher 1964. “Telescope: A Talk With Hitchcock Part I and II,” Canadian Broadcasting Center.

  Martin, Adrian 1992. “Mise en Scène Is Dead,” Continuum 5:2, p. 97.

       CHAPTER 18

      HIGH SHOTS

  IN THE AGE OF CAMERA DRONES, the popularity of shots from above has become undeniable. It’s one of those cinematic tools you have at your disposal that is always at risk of being used “because it looks cool,” yet is without narrative purpose.

  High shots hold a lot of power. One reason is because we humans can’t get those views very easily on our own. For centuries man dreamed of flying like a bird—something we weren’t able to do until 1783 with the invention of the balloon. We place great value on real estate that gives us a bird’s-eye view. Colonial forts were built on the top of plateaus and bluffs so an approaching enemy could be easily spotted. Ultimately, there is great emotional beauty to be had with a high shot.

  On the flip side, many of us have a fear of heights. If you’ve ever dared to step onto the very top of a ladder, or edge too close to a cliff, you know the vertigo that can grab you. So while a high shot can achieve a sense of omnipotence, it can equally convey a sobering reality.

  Overusing or misusing such a powerful camera perspective in your movie can spell the difference between an amateur and a seasoned professional with a full grasp of the visual language.

  Figure 18.1. The famous composite from The Birds, revealing an objective view of the tragedy below. The Birds ©1963 Universal Pictures.

  The most famous high shot by Hitchcock (fig. 18.1) is from The Birds (1963). It is the only shot in the film from the perspective of the birds, and is just before their big attack on Bodega Bay. In his interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock said this shot served three purposes:

    1. To convey the visual sentence: “the birds have arrived.”

    2. To show a map of the area.

    3. To compress time between the two surrounding shots—allowing for the fire trucks to arrive between shots one and three.

  Those three reasons are just for one shot in one film, and they are not the definitive reasons for all high shots. But it does open a doorway into the thought process that goes into a shot like that. Hitchcock felt it was so important that he had a matte artist paint the broad area, filmed the middle segment from a high crane, and then filmed the fire separately, compositing all the elements together. It would have taken weeks of intensive labor.

  So when you look at your script, how do you know when to use one of these God’s-eye views? Let’s go through the major considerations.

  STERILE OBJECTIVITY

  As director William Dickerson explains in the Hitch20 docu-series, a high shot conveys an objective point of view. As with any other wide shot, the high angle provides a counterbalance to a closer camera setup. Where the subjective view would focus close on character emotion and facial reaction, the objective view would be devoid of specific emotions and be more apt to provoke broad contemplation about the circumstances. But a high camera shot adds a certain menace to the feeling. “It’s almost a clinical or sterile viewpoint, like a security camera,” says Dickerson.

  KEY MOMENT

  This ability for the high shot to get the audience’s attention is important at a big moment of change in the plot. When the plot shifts, the audience’s perspective on the story shifts, emotions shift, and ideas shift. Shifting the camera to a new viewpoint helps the audience internalize this change on a gut level.

  In T
opaz (1969), there’s a murder scene in which a man shoots a woman up close with a gun. Hitchcock cuts to a high shot as the woman slowly collapses to the floor. As she drops, her dress fans out onto the floor, resembling a puddle of blood. This perspective accentuates the moment of death of the woman and leaves us with an eerie omnipresent shock—the camera composition is just as shocking as the event itself.

  HELPLESSNESS

  As in the bird’s-eye shot in The Birds, the high angle shot tends to induce a feeling of helplessness. If you want your audience to feel that the situation has become so bad and the characters have become so overwhelmed that nothing can be done, craning/droning up from close to a wider high angle can enhance that helpless feeling.

  In The Birds, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) is sitting on a couch as the birds are chirping outside, clambering to peck through the boarded windows. Melanie feels so helpless that she falls back onto the couch; the camera flies upward, looking down on her. This uses the space above the couch for dramatic effect, as if the world is pushing down on her.

  SUPERNATURAL PRESENCE

  While the high shot can evoke a feeling of helplessness, or a sterile objectivity, in certain situations it can also call upon feelings of the supernatural. It’s a feeling that someone’s watching from beyond the grave. The stairway shot in Psycho (1960) is a great example of this. Is the ghost of Norman’s mother watching? His other victims? God?

  Hitchcock’s TV episode “Banquo’s Chair” (1959) is a ghost story, where the ghost of a woman shows up at dinner to haunt the man who killed her. Hitchcock uses a high shot above the dinner table at the beginning of the scene, prior to the ghost arriving. Its placement early in the story evokes an odd feeling, as if supernatural forces are observing from above. It plants the seed for the ominous feeling that increases throughout the scene. When the ghost finally does arrive, it’s an emotional payoff for that supernatural setup.

  NEEDLE IN HAYSTACK

  The high shot also carries weight as a storytelling tool, especially if it’s in motion as in the famous high shot from Notorious (1946). In what Hitch20’s William C. Martell calls a “needle-in-haystack” shot, the camera tracks in to something small hidden within a great expanse.