Suspense With a Camera

by Jeffrey Michael Bays

  In Young and Innocent (1937), the camera starts from above, looking down on the crowd. This unique perspective immediately calls attention to itself. It’s like the director saying, “Hey, here’s something important coming up.” The camera then cranes down into the crowd and glides toward the band playing music. The camera then continues to get closer to the drummer until it pans down to his face. It is then obvious that the man’s eye is twitching—the recognizable trait in the criminal that the police are looking for. Essentially, with this single shot, Hitchcock is showing us the criminal before the characters in the scene find him. The characters know he must be in this crowd somewhere. Since we have already found him, it increases suspense as their search plays out.

  With this long ballroom shot, Hitchcock wants to show us this visual sentence: “Here’s a big ballroom with lots of people; none of these people know that the drummer is the killer.”

  SENSE OF SCALE

  The famous crop-duster scene in North by Northwest (1959) is an example I often use in my scene tectonics courses (based on my book Between the Scenes). Because the scene occurs after a busied chase through a train station, the vapid, flat terrain of the Indiana farmland is an emotional relief. The scene begins with a sixty-second wide shot from above, looking down on a straight, endless highway as a bus pulls to a stop. A tiny little man gets off the little bitty bus, miniaturized by this overpowering expanse.

  While this shot provides a change in pace for the audience to stop and think, catch their breath, and prepare for the big crop-duster attack forthcoming, it also establishes the emptiness from which the pending menace will appear and that there is no place to hide.

  Later in the same movie, Hitchcock uses a high shot looking straight down from atop the United Nations building as Cary Grant walks down the sidewalk to a taxi. At least, we assume it is Cary Grant. He appears so small on the screen that it could be anyone. The immense scale of the building puts the tiny humans and their little cars to shame. As Matthew Stubstad says in Hitch20, this shot gives us the feeling that “he’s going up against great odds.”

  FURTHER READING

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

  Truffaut, François 1986. Hitchcock / Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, Paladin, London.

       CHAPTER 19

      BUILDING THE DANGER OFF-SCREEN

  IT’S PROBABLY HAPPENED TO YOU. You’re on a train, or sitting in an airport and someone nearby is having a heated conversation on their phone. You can’t help but be lured into the drama. Soon you begin taking sides, making a decision on which person is the most innocent—the person sitting near you or the person on the other end. Even though you can’t hear that other person, your mind conjures them up in order to fill in the blanks. A one-sided conversation becomes fully alive in your imagination (Lehrer).

  GESTALT ASSAULT

  This is possible in part because of the Gestalt effect. The human mind, in an effort to process the data that comes in through the senses, makes shortcuts and extrapolates missing parts for the sake of continuity (Zettl). The result is that we only need hints of an object for the mind to conjure up the whole object (fig. 19.1). This is probably a survival mechanism—when a lion is watching us from behind prairie grass, we needed only catch a glimpse of it to become fully alert and to survive. When the brain’s imagination fills in the gaps, it automatically becomes more personal. We enjoy cartoons, for instance, in large part because there is so much missing information in the abstracted drawings that the mind steps into action to seek closure on missing information. Our imagination is fully engaged and taken out of passive mode.

  Figure 19.1. When parts of an idea are missing, the mind fills in the gaps to provide psychological closure.

  In much the same way, suspense can be activated by leaving certain things off the screen. Hitchcock always pointed to his famous shower scene in Psycho (1960) to explain this, that we never actually see the knife hitting Marion Crane. The quick montage of all the various perspectives of the knife stabbing toward Marion creates within the human mind that imaginary continuity, so that we instantly believe we’ve seen the stabbing when we haven’t. The sound effects of the knife’s impact and the intense violin help sell the idea.

  The lesson to pull away from this is that the less you show on screen, the more impact it will have on the audience, because it activates Gestalt.

  BUILDING DANGER OVER TIME

  Similarly, our enjoyment of fear through watching a movie can be heightened by withholding sight of the danger. In Jaws (1975), Steven Spielberg gives us hints of the danger lurking beneath the water, along with the occasional shark fin protruding into view. The absence of seeing the entire shark increases our anxiety tenfold. Jim Gillespie does something similar in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) by teasing with quick glimpses of a cloaked fisherman. Since we don’t know who is under the cloak, it makes him more ominous. When Spielberg’s shark and Gillespie’s fisherman do fully appear on screen they are that much scarier, because they benefit from being the physical manifestations of what our mind has conjured up.

  There’s a key scene in I Know What You Did Last Summer where Helen is doing mundane tasks in her house. Gillespie frames the background behind Helen at just the right moment to show us that the cloaked fisherman walks through the front door unnoticed. As Helen continues her chores, we get another glimpse of the fisherman walking out of view at the top of the stairs, just as Helen turns and begins to walk up the stairs. Now we have full suspense, as Helen goes into her room walking into danger. Gillespie’s camera cuts to shots of the dark closet, cueing us that the fisherman is hiding there. That dark closet raises the suspense as the scene plays out, with Helen completely unaware.

  In Hitchcock’s TV episode “Poison” (1958), we get a similar construction, in that we are not allowed to see the poisonous snake until the end of the film. Hitchcock deliberately lets the anxiety build up about this snake hiding under the sheets. The protagonist is unable to move or make a startling sound, lest it provokes the hidden snake to strike him. Because we are not able to see the snake, we must intently watch the man’s facial expressions to gauge whether he has been bitten.

  Because of this unseen snake, “Poison” begins to build up doubt about whether the snake is even real. We think maybe the man has imagined this threat in his own mind. Later, Hitchcock reveals a secret to the audience—that the snake is real and shows it sliding under a pillow. Now the snake poses a real threat to the unwitting characters who now believe it’s not there. Once again suspense is generated around a helpless viewer unable to warn the characters not to sit near the pillows.

  For a director known for his creative murder scenes, it’s not surprising that some of Hitchcock’s best occur just out of view. We never see Thorwald murder his wife in Rear Window (1954), which adds to the ominous threat we feel when he walks into Jeffries’ room.

  TOO HARD TO WATCH

  Ironically, television censors prevented Hitchcock from showing gratuitous violence on the TV screen. This actually made his suspense scarier for the viewer.

  Hitchcock’s TV episode “Revenge” includes a murder scene which is played out in apparent real time, but out of the camera’s view. We watch in one continuous shot as the protagonist slowly opens the door to a hotel room, walks in, walks out of view, hits a man several times with a wrench, and then walks back out, closing the door behind him. Because this scene is contained entirely in one shot and without a music score, we feel the raw reality of the situation.

  It becomes powerful because our imagination is provoked by the sounds of the attack, but we are unable to move the camera and peer around the corner to see it. Hitchcock has placed us in a helpless situation and mocks the seriousness of the scene by letting us hear the rumbled dance music from below.

  While Hitchcock frequently shows raw violence in his films, there are moments where he withholds it from view for the effect of drawing out an obje
ctive judgment from the viewer. The final shot of Frenzy (1972) is an example of this, as the camera pans away and backs down the stairs and out of the building while the protagonist begins to enter a woman’s apartment to kill her. In this moment we think, “there he goes again,” and are essentially leaving the situation with a moral stamp of disapproval. He’s getting away with it again and the police aren’t catching him.

  By the end of Frenzy we no longer need to see the murders, because we’ve already seen the first one, which is enough. The thought of them happening off-screen is much more powerful.

  If there isn’t a twist and the audience already clearly knows what is going to happen, it’s very often a better option to show the outside of the building and let the viewers imagine the event taking place inside.

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

    Jaws (1975), Dir. Steven Spielberg

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Poison,” Season 4, Episode 1 (1958)

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Revenge,” Season 1, Episode 1 (1955)

    Frenzy (1972)—final tracking shot.

  FURTHER READING

  Bays, Jeffrey 2014. Between the Scenes. Michael Wiese Productions.

  Lehrer, Jonah 2010. “The Science of Eavesdropping,” Wired (9/10/10).

  Zettl, Herbert 1999. Sight, Sound, Motion. Wadsworth, pp.102–103.

       CHAPTER 20

      CHARACTERS THAT CATCH US LOOKING

  LOOKING INTO THE CAMERA.

  What some would consider an acting faux pas can be used with great effect in a suspense environment. When a character catches a glimpse of the audience by looking directly at the camera, it creates an unsettling moment.

  Often it’s one of those things editors watch out for—when an actor does it by mistake it can screw up the flow of a scene for the very fact that it takes the audience out of the story. It wakes us up. We realize, “Oh, that was weird.”

  When used intentionally, however, it can provide a reflexive moment where the viewer realizes that the film is acknowledging their act of watching. This can call attention to the narrative form, the film medium itself, or the very reasons we are watching the film.

  CAUGHT LOOKING

  An academic of film theory would explain that it’s all very scopophilic, that humans crave voyeurism and that this is the very basis for the success of movies. We watch a film with the assumption that the actors on the screen aren’t aware we are watching. It’s as if we’re secretly spying on the neighbor through a crack in the curtain. When the actor turns and acknowledges the audience, it can make us feel that we’ve been caught looking—an unsettling leap from the screen.

  There’s a stunning moment in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) where a dinner-table conversation is led astray by the musings of Joseph Cotten’s character, Uncle Charlie. He begins a soliloquy about his hate for women as the camera dollies toward him: “greedy, petty, ugly, fat women.” His niece responds defiantly, “They’re alive. They’re human beings!” Charlie turns directly toward us with a tepid, “Are they?”

  This sudden stare into the lens prompts us for a reaction. It wakes us up from the fantasy so that we once again realize we’re watching a movie. In turn we begin to think about the power of what he just said—just how crazy he is, and perhaps just how intellectually aware he is beyond the confines of the story. Has he spawned consciousness like the holodeck character Professor Moriarty in Star Trek: The Next Generation? It makes us uneasy, and therefore is a great tool for manipulating the anxiety of an audience.

  Figure 21.1.

  Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (2007) contains a great example of characters that break the fourth wall and essentially take the viewers hostage along with the cast. Our act of watching the film is terrorized as much as the hostages in the house. One of the criminals turns to the camera and asks, “You’re on their side, aren’t you? So, who will you bet with?” While this would usually be a comic moment (as with the asides in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), it is instead an act of terror, as we are forced into too much realism—to watch torture and to be helpless to stop it.

  SOLIDIFIES EMPATHY FOR PROTAGONIST

  When we see things through a protagonist’s eyes in a point-of-view sequence (see chapter 4), we see secondary characters looking at that protagonist by looking at the camera. With this shared viewpoint, the feeling of a secondary character looking directly at us makes us feel, temporarily, that we are in fact the protagonist. We’re standing in his shoes. Automatically we are primed for empathy with his emotional struggles and intellectual logic.

  In a film like Rear Window (1954), a glance into the camera provides a delicious moment when the criminal, Thorwald, suddenly notices the telescopic lens that Jeffries has been using to spy on him from across the courtyard. Because the film has been shot in point-of-view—we see what Jeffries sees through the lens—we feel like we’ve been caught looking as well. And then we share in the rising danger of the criminal’s next move—to come after us.

  GIVES THE CHARACTER POWER

  This is true in all of the examples above—addressing the camera gives a certain cinematic power to the person looking at us, adding cinematic weight to what they do next. We instinctually assume that they are going to do something really significant soon. That’s certainly true in Rear Window, as it sparks Thorwald to immediately make his way toward the apartment we’re sitting in, raising the tension to its peak.

  In Hitchcock’s TV episode “Lamb to the Slaughter,” Mary’s husband spins around, looks at Mary, then into the camera, and says “Try and stop me.” It’s as if this challenge is directed to both Mary and us. We then side with Mary in order to overcome his extra fourth-wall power.

  In Hitchcock’s TV episode “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” the psychiatrist glances and nods at the camera when he first greets Mr. Pelham in the night club. It’s a moment that immediately puts us into the room. We feel that we’re sitting there observing the conversation and that he is well aware that we are present.

  The result of that added power of audience allegiance is that we are more likely to believe the psychiatrist’s explanation of events when Pelham goes into a frenzy of paranoia. The irony that Hitchcock creates, though, is that the psychiatrist does believe him. With this added credibility, we then get carried right along with Pelham’s delirium.

  WHEN THE NARRATOR DOES IT

  Generally, a supporting character does the lens-looking, as a way of turning the tables on the protagonist. But in many films (those of Woody Allen come to mind) the protagonist is the narrator. Rather than someone narrating the film in voice-over, the hero turns to the camera outside of diegesis and explains the story to the viewer. This is an exaggerated form of the “caught looking” phenomenon and serves as a way to build a personal rapport with the audience.

  While it’s used frequently in comedies, Hitchcock used this device masterfully in his television episode “Arthur” in order to—of course—rattle the viewer. The entire story is told from Arthur’s narcissistic perspective. He talks to us while he kills a chicken, and then apologizes for being melodramatic. Then he reveals to us proudly that he’s a murderer and that he has gotten away with it. “You’ve never heard of me because I never got caught,” is his signature line.

  Arthur pulls us along the story, turns us against his wife and against the police, as he murders her and hides the body via wood chipper. During the murder, Hitchcock’s camera moves in on Arthur’s face while he is choking his wife. Arthur slowly looks up at us and grins. He’s so smug and proud of what he’s done and loves that we got to see him do it. Creepy!

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

    Funny Games (2007), Dir. Michael Haneke—Paul turns and talks to us during a hostage situation.

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” Season 1, Episode 10 (1955)—The psychologist sees the camera before he sits.

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” Season 3, Episode 28 (1958)—Jack looks into the c
amera before Mary attacks him.

    Rear Window (1954)—Thorwald looks into the camera when he catches Jeffries watching him.

    Shadow of a Doubt (1943)—Uncle Charlie looks into the camera during a dramatic monologue.

    Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Arthur,” Season 5, Episode 1 (1959)—Arthur grins at the camera during a murder scene.

  FURTHER READING

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

       PART SEVEN

      Q&A WITH FILM PRACTITIONERS

       CHAPTER 21

      “THE BOURNE IDENTITY” EDITOR SAAR KLEIN

  SAAR KLEIN is a film editor, nominated twice for Academy Awards, first for his work on The Thin Red Line and again for Almost Famous. Saar began his career working for editor Joe Hutshing on the film JFK (directed by Oliver Stone). Saar also edited the action thriller The Bourne Identity and co-edited Terrence Malick’s The New World. In 2008, he edited Jumper with director Doug Liman. Saar also directed and edited his own feature After the Fall in 2014.

  The Bourne Identity (2002) is a modern film that captures the essence of Hitchcock’s chase films featuring characters running and hiding through expanses of geographic space. Like in North by Northwest, a protagonist is on the run, unsure of why he’s being pursued yet determined to face his antagonist. The film contained so much tension that I had to catch up with its editor, Saar Klein, to find out some of his insights. Klein’s own film, After the Fall, demonstrates many of his editing techniques from The Bourne Identity.

  JEFFREY: First of all, congrats on directing After the Fall (2014). It’s a beautiful film with great moments of tension and suspense.