Mastering suspense

The proper application of suspense techniques allows for the creation of a strong bond between the viewer and the film. I will present the method described by Alfred Hitchcock in the book Hitchcock-Truffaut, a collection of interviews between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut in 1966, which was transcribed into a magnificent book. I will go a bit further and connect his method to the challenges of contemporary screenwriting; the screenplay I’m talking about isn’t just a film script, but also a script for a series, a YouTube video, or a TikTok video.

Hook ?

The “hook,” for example, which we know well on social media—the initial grab in the first second or few seconds that makes us choose to keep watching—is a suspense technique.

The Stakes

We need the viewers of our films to want to keep watching, for various reasons:

• Commercial reasons, first, so they stay connected to this private TV channel, to generate advertising revenue, or to this YouTube channel, or to Netflix, so they continue paying their subscription.
• But also for artistic reasons, so they receive the best of what we want to share with them.
• And even for strategic reasons, so they derive the greatest possible satisfaction from watching this film, video, or series episode.

How to Make a Boring Film

Alfred Hitchcock gives an example full of humor and insight, as he so often does. Let’s remember that Alfred Hitchcock was known in his time as the “Master of Suspense” and was a prolific, commercially successful filmmaker. This earned him harsh criticism in French intellectual circles, among others. Film critics who later became filmmakers, founders of Cahiers du Cinéma—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others—proposed the idea that Alfred Hitchcock was an auteur, not just a merchant of emotions on the big screen.

The following anecdote illustrates well how one can make a boring film. A priori, this isn’t what we aim to do, but it’s the foundation for understanding the power of his method, which he recounts in the book and which I’ll rephrase:

• Imagine you turn on a recorder for about ten minutes during a family meal or a gathering of friends, or in your professional context. A moment where people are talking together. Then, you transcribe everything said during those ten minutes in a room into a script. Unity of place, unity of time, a certain number of characters.
• Next, you hire a talented filmmaker. Imagine the filmmaker you prefer, who will direct the film based on this script. You also choose a talented set designer, cinematographer, sound engineer, etc. The actors are excellent, as are the costumes.
• The direction, filming, editing, and sound are magnificent, with camera movements, emotions, the precision of the actors’ expressions, the beauty of the sets... But what happens in this film is exactly what happened in the recording.
• In the moment you recorded, maybe there were emotions, maybe it was a family dinner where important information was shared, or a work meeting where significant issues were discussed, important to the participants, such as a contractor trying to get hired.
• This film lasts ten minutes. Despite all the efforts in quality direction, acting, etc., you can agree with me that this film will be very boring. It will have almost no interest for the viewer. We don’t care, ultimately, about their stories; they don’t concern us. Even if they are a priori interesting or important to them, we don’t feel involved.
• But imagine we are forced to watch these ten minutes. We can’t change the channel. We’re in a cinema, and it would be rude to get up and leave because it’s the film’s premiere, and we know the team.
• After ten minutes of deep boredom, suddenly, BOOOOOOM! A bomb explodes in the film’s story. Suddenly, there’s smoke, torn bodies, injured people, screams, blood, tears. Ah, finally! Something’s happening!
• Even if we don’t particularly like on-screen violence, at least there’s an event that concerns us a little, that makes us feel an emotion. And the film ends there.
• This is what Alfred Hitchcock calls the “effect of surprise.”

How to Make a Gripping Film

Let’s take the exact same film, the same director, the same filming, the same script, and insert one tiny change:

• The first shot of the film is a close-up of a green canvas bag placed on one of the chairs in the company’s meeting room (if we imagine the recorder was placed in a workplace). Inside the bag, next to one of the protagonists, is an object we alone can see: a grayish, rectangular, soft-looking item with wires and an electronic mechanism, and a red LED countdown timer: 9:59, 9:58, 9:57…
• It’s a bomb, we recognize it immediately, and we know it will explode in 10 minutes.
• Then the scene begins, exactly the same as in the previous film. The people talk, debate. But we, the viewers, know that in ten minutes, it will explode. And we need to try to understand why.
• We observe every glance, every gesture in light of this information, this bomb. Do they know? Will they discover it in time before it explodes? Will it really explode? Is there a suicide bomber in the room? We ask ourselves a thousand questions.
• At regular intervals, we see the countdown again: 7:12, 7:11, later, 4:24, 4:23, and so on, in case we missed the first shot.
• As time passes, we ask more questions about these characters, their reasons for being there, why the bomb is there. And we become interested in every word, every inflection, every glance, every movement.
• We might even want to enter the room and shout: “Stop, stop talking about all this, there’s a bomb here. It’s going to explode, deal with the bomb!”
• No one seems to see the bomb; it’s almost unbearable. At one point, someone stands up. We think: “He’s going to discover it, he’s going to do something!” But no! No one sees it! The emotion in us reaches its peak. And after ten minutes, the bomb explodes. And the film ends.
• This is what Alfred Hitchcock calls “suspense.”

The Mechanics of Building Suspense

What made the second version of the film grip our attention? How does it work? There was a gap in information between what the viewer knew and what the characters in the film knew. We were ahead of the characters. We knew what was going to happen; they didn’t. This information gap involves us in the film. We are active; we are actors in the film. Because we feel we have the power to change the course of events, and we want that power. We are emotionally interacting with the film.

This gap in information and the play with information is what we call dramaturgy. Dramaturgy is the art of storytelling. The story is the same. The sequence of events is exactly the same. People talk, and at the end, a bomb that was placed there explodes. The only difference is how it’s told, the dramaturgy (or narration). We chose to show the bomb at the beginning or not. The story is the same, the sequence of events is exactly the same, but we construct a way of telling the story for the viewer.

Alfred Hitchcock considered the viewer to be the main character of the film. It’s the viewer who must experience emotions. It doesn’t matter if the actors do or not. If I see someone crying on screen, I won’t necessarily cry. But if I’ve become attached to that character and know why they’re crying, I can share their emotions. More than that, for example, if I know a character will die in the next minute, I can cry, even if the character is very joyful on screen. But I know what’s going to happen to them. I’m afraid for them, I’m sad for them.

So, Alfred Hitchcock builds his films by placing the viewer at the center of his attention. The story doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the narration, the dramaturgy—the journey the viewer takes, the interaction between the viewer and the film. We’re often told that cinema is a linear narrative compared to non-linear narratives like video games or interactive media. But in reality, cinema is highly interactive. We participate in what’s happening. And it’s the filmmaker’s art to make us participate. And we can experience a very strong interaction with what unfolds before us.

This is why modernist multimedia approaches that claimed to offer more viewer engagement than cinema were particularly superficial.

Suspense, therefore, is a technique that works on the gap in information between the viewer and the film’s characters, engaging the viewer as a participant in the film. This information gap also works in reverse. There can be characters who know information we don’t. And we want to discover it to understand what’s happening.
If we look at films through the lens of suspense construction, we see that it infuses every detail in every scene. And not just in the beginnings and endings of series episodes, but at every moment.

Bonus: Inspector Columbo

Columbo was a successful TV series in the 1980s. Inspector Columbo was played by actor Peter Falk, who had immense likability among viewers. I argue that this likability came much more from how the series was constructed than from Peter Falk’s talent. I don’t mean to discredit Peter Falk, who was an excellent actor, but to explain that the success of the series didn’t rest solely on him, far from it.

Each episode was structured the same way:

• At the start, we witness a murder, each time in a completely different context, which was actually quite disorienting, as the first scene of each episode could be very different from one to the next.
• We weren’t even sure it was *Columbo*, except that at some point, a murder was committed, always. And we saw the murderer; we knew who the murderer was.
• Then, the first scene ends, and Inspector Columbo arrives, whose role was to investigate and discover the murderer. He arrives, always very vague, and doesn’t seem very serious. He has an old raincoat, a dog, an old car. He’s always talking about his wife, seems quite naive. You could sell him almost anything.
• And most importantly, Columbo meets and talks with the murderer, without knowing, of course, that it’s the murderer. We know. But he doesn’t, and he seems very gullible in the face of lies that are obvious to us.
• Here, we’re in suspense, because we want to tell Columbo: “Come on, realize it! He’s lying to you, it’s so obvious, it’s him, it’s him!” And we watch, powerless, as this vague Columbo seems to make no progress. And this sparks our interest; we so want to help him, we know, it’s not complicated! And he doesn’t find it, he doesn’t advance.
• At some point, in every episode of the series, we start to have a doubt. We think maybe Columbo has figured it out.
• And what’s recurrent in every episode is that Columbo will make sure the murderer trips themselves up: Columbo will create a situation that forces the murderer to admit their guilt.
• So Columbo becomes a director, and we become directors with him. We become the directors of the situation that will finally reveal the truth we’ve known from the beginning and make it socially acknowledged. Justice is served.
• This makes Columbo absolutely likable, because Columbo has become us. And we’re even better than him; we knew better than him.
• And then, thanks to him, we become directors of a dramatic situation that exposes the murderer.

In Columbo, suspense, more than just a dramaturgical tool, structures the very subject of the series and organizes its success and viewer loyalty over time. Thanks to suspense, viewers knew they would each time become architects of the truth, which was extremely satisfying.

A leading narrative tool

So, suspense is both a primary narrative tool—perhaps even the main narrative tool of cinema, and often of novels as well, and series, and YouTube videos, etc.—but also a deeper engagement link, beyond the story of an individual film or video, beyond even the desire, at the end of an episode, to get the answer in the next episode. It’s a lasting bond between works and their viewers, built on the gap in information between the viewer and the characters.