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Want to create nail-biting suspense? Want your audience hanging on tenterhooks? Brett Lamb looks to the experts to gather some tips and techniques for creating edge-of-your-seat tension.
Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, once famously explained the feeling by describing a bomb underneath a table. If the bomb explodes, the audience is given a shock. In a suspense film, however, the audience knows there's a bomb underneath the table. It's rigged to explode at noon and the clock is ticking. 'In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene,' Hitchcock explained. 'In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.'1
Suspense, then, is a feeling of anxiety that accompanies uncertainty about the outcome of a scene. At the beginning of Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008), the audience is kept in suspense as Major-General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh) attempts to recover a bomb that failed to detonate. Singer uses dramatic music and low-key lighting to create unbearable tension as von Tresckow apprehensively attempts to retrieve the explosives. David Fincher uses slow motion and an ominous soundtrack to heighten the tension in Panic Room (2002) when Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) leaves the safety of the panic room for a few nail-biting seconds in order to retrieve her cell phone.
But suspense isn't just a staple of horror films and thrillers. Even in romance there is an opportunity to exploit dramatic tension. In the final scene of Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005), Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and Mr Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) meet in a fog-filled field. Long silences and lingering shots of the characters are used to draw out the suspense before they kiss.
Creating a suspenseful short film is a precarious balancing act that starts in pre-production and continues until the final cut is complete. It requires an awareness of audience, story, characters and how to effectively exploit the language of film.
STUDYING SUSPENSE
Before you create a short suspense film of your own, it's a good idea to study suspense scenes from famous films. Grab a bucket of popcorn and a notepad and...