the makings of a suspenseful scene

Let’s just say there’s more to this than I thought. But I won’t keep you in suspense! *slaps knee and doubles over in laughter*

...Or will I?

What even is suspense?

According to Google, suspense is “a state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen.”

Okay, that definition is just as vague as what it’s describing. Basically, “suspense” is that butterfly feeling in your stomach when you’re watching something and you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, but you have an idea what might happen and you’re excited/dreading to find out what happens/see if you’re right. You’re anticipating something for better or worse and it produces mixed feelings. (I’d liken it to the buzz you get from drinking too much coffee – like me right now writing this article!)

That probably wasn’t any clearer…Well, that’s the whole point of suspense! The uncertainty.

No, but seriously, if it’s not clear, keep reading.

See what I’m doing? I’m keeping you in suspense!

Sorry, I’m about to confuse you even further.

The bomb under the table

I’ll link you to the video where he explains it better than me, but he said imagine there’s a scene of two people talking and after five minutes, a bomb goes off. Yes, it’s going to be shocking for a few seconds but before that, what were you feeling? Bored? Curious as to what relevance the conversation had? Wondered where it was going? It was mysterious but you weren’t really feeling anything the whole time.

On the other hand, Hitchcock said if you show the bomb at the beginning of the scene or even halfway through, the audience is then waiting for it to go off. Dreading it. You’ve made them tense. You’ve created suspense.

Rather than thinking “what the hell is going on?” and turning off, the information you’ve provided engages the audience. Instead of waiting for the scene to end so they can have all the information to understand what they just watched, they’re shouting at the screen, “There’s a bomb under the table! Why the hell are you talking about nothing?! Do something!”

That’s the reaction you’re looking for as a writer. You want your audience to be constantly engaged, feeling everything they’re supposed to.

Delivery of information

I know Mr Hitchcock said mystery and suspense are different but…they’re really not. They both work on how they deliver information to the audience.

Something is mysterious because of a lack of information and something is suspenseful for the same reason. An audience tries to piece a mystery together with the information you drip-feed them, and they’re put in suspense with what they’re given.

If you give them nothing, the answer to the mystery is a shocking surprise but the viewer didn’t feel tense about finding it out. And if you give the viewer everything they need to know to figure it out, it’s predictable and disappointing.

The scene Hitchcock describes is successfully suspenseful because you know the bomb is under the table. The danger has been foreshadowed. You’ve been given that information. But, maybe you’ve not been told when it’s going to go off or what will happen when it does. You’ve been given the right amount of information to keep you in suspense.

Drip-feeding

Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher series – that’s the one played by Tom Cruise in the movies but not anymore because he’s not tall enough (Lee Child thinks he’s Jack Reacher and is insecure about his height despite being over 6ft), not the one played by Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and John Krasinski like I thought (even though they’re basically the same character).

Anyway! Mr Child said suspense is “like the old cartoon of the big fish eating a smaller fish eating a very small fish, you’ll find out the big answer after a string of smaller drip-drip-drip answers.”

Essentially, to put a viewer in suspense, you’ve got to give them something to keep watching but not too little or too much because they’ll turn off.

The best suspenseful scenes have an element of mystery and the best mysteries are suspenseful.

Now, I know I said I didn’t want to upset you Alfred, but there is overlap between mystery and suspense, my friend. Wait, what’s that high-pitched noise…? Alfred, we can talk about this, put down the knife

Knives Out

As I said, whodunits can be suspenseful. The best recent example of this is Knives Out.

I’m just going to assume you’ve seen it, but if not, SPOILER WARNING.

So, Knives Out starts as a whodunit, a modern Agatha Christie. Harlan Thrombey (Christoper Plummer) seems to have slashed his own throat but renowned sleuth Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) suspects foul play. When Blanc interviews the Thrombeys, we learn all of his family have motives to kill him through a series of flashbacks.

But then, Blanc interviews Harlan’s nurse, Marta, and we find out he wasn’t murdered and didn’t commit suicide but Marta gave him an accidental overdose then he helped her cover it up because if she was caught, her mother would be deported.

At this point, we think the mystery has been solved…but there’s still more than an hour of the movie left. The story has changed from “Who killed Harlan?” to “Will Marta be caught?”, from a whodunit to a thriller, from mystery to suspense.

And the suspense is persistent because it is intensified throughout.

For instance, Marta is known to have a “regurgitative reaction to mistruthing”. So, if she lies about what happened to Harlan, she pukes, and she’s tested on this repeatedly.

spoiler alert!

But at least nobody knows what she did, right? Wrong! To make matters worse, someone begins blackmailing her. And so on.

This tension lasts right to the end when we find out Marta didn’t actually give Harlan an overdose. Instead, it turns out the contents of his medicine bottles were already swapped by his grandson Ransom (Chris Evans). He knew Marta was going to receive his grandfather’s inheritance if and when he died, so he intended to frame her for his murder

But! Marta instinctively gave Harlan the right doses of each medicine and tricks Ransom into confessing to setting her up and blackmailing. So, Marta gets off the hook, receives the inheritance, her mother is safe and the audience can finally breathe.

HOWEVER, as vital as it is to continually increase tension throughout a scene or movie, like any story, suspense should have peaks and troughs, moments of levity, breathing space before your breathtaking climax.

Knives Out borders on being a comedy because it’s full of levity, jokes about Marta’s situation (such as the dogs finding incriminating evidence) that make you laugh but also add to the suspense.

Levity is essential because you don’t want to overwhelm your audience all at once. Instead, lull them into a false sense of security by tricking them into thinking they’re off the hook then reel them back in!

Now, I know I’m just describing the plot of Knives Out when I’m supposed to be talking about writing a single suspenseful scene, but-

1) the movie is clearly full of suspenseful scenes you should study,

2) at the end of the day, you don’t want the audience’s attention for just one scene but the whole film,

3) and it’s a good example of subverting expectations when it comes to mystery and suspense.

…but seeing as I’m supposed to be teaching you how to write a suspenseful scene, not a whole movie, I thought I’d dissect one of the tensest scenes in cinema…

Inglourious Bastards

The opening scene of Inglorious Bastards is the best example of Hitchcock’s bomb under the table I can think of, except with Jews under the floorboards.

Again, I’m going to assume you’ve seen this scene. If not, GO WATCH IT. It is truly a masterclass in suspense, which is why I’m going to try and break it down for you.

So just think, if you didn’t know the family were there and then Christoph Waltz ordered them to be murdered, yeah, you might’ve been shocked but what about the previous twenty minutes? If you weren’t told the family was under the floorboards and dreaded them being found, you’d wonder why the hell are these two men talking about milk and rats in different languages? You wouldn’t be experiencing suspense but confusion.

Then again, even without the reveal, the climax of the scene wouldn’t have been a total surprise. You’d have an idea where it was heading because of the context.

1) You’re already waiting for something to happen because it’s a Tarantino movie; there’s got to be gratuitous violence at some point, right? Tarantino plays on that expectation by dragging it out and uses the reveal of the family to drive the tension of the scene.

2) There are Nazis searching for Jews and if you listened in History class, you’d know people used to shelter them and usually got caught. What would be the point of the scene if they didn’t?

The context of a scene gives an audience an indication of where it’s going. Metatextual knowledge of tropes provides an audience with enough information to either be excited or anxious about the outcome of a scene.

However, don’t make your suspenseful scene predictable. Use tropes but not clichés. Don’t give the audience the satisfaction of saying “I knew that would happen!”

Like Rian Johnson and Knives Out, keep your audience on its toes with twists and turns. In Inglorious Basterds, I guess the twist would be that Shoshana escapes and Landa lets her. So just when you think the suspense is over because she’s escaped, Tarantino makes you nervous again because now, you’re waiting for the two to face off again...

Character design

By the time Landa and Shoshana do meet again, we’ve spent time getting to know adult Shosanna. She has a boyfriend, her own cinema - she’s built a nice little life for herself. But now Frederick Zoller, a Nazi hero, is lusting after her, wanting to use her cinema and invites her to dinner with Josef Gobbels. Then, the man who killed her family shows up and she’s left alone with him.

Just like in Knives Out, when characters continually test Marta’s lie detector, Landa tests Shosanna by ordering her a strudel with cream which isn’t Kosher so if she doesn’t eat it, he knows she’s a Jew. Not only does the audience feel tension because of context, in this instance knowledge about Judaism, but also because of their knowledge about the characters.

Character design is essential to making a suspenseful scene. An audience will experience more suspense if they have a better idea of the characters involved. In this case, we know Landa is unnervingly polite, not easily fooled and ruthless. On the other hand, we’ve grown to care about Shosanna so we’re anxious Landa’s going to be clever enough again to figure who she is and hurt her.

Knowing a character can give us an indication of what they’re going to do, make us fear them or make us fear something’s going to happen to them.

The intensity of suspense is proportional to our emotional investment in what is going on. Like in Knives Out, you don’t want Marta to be caught because you know she was caring for Harlan and is a good nurse/person.

Simply put, both Rian Johnson and Quentin Tarantino build up suspense by building up character.

Conflict

The main source of tension in the scene between Landa and Shosanna is their conflict. They are opposites; man and woman, young and old, Jew and Nazi.

Context and character design have created conflict, the backbone of any suspenseful scene.

The conflict of a suspenseful scene depends on its context, its characters and purpose – all the things we’ve discussed. So, it could be a physical conflict like a fight or sexual tension, or psychological like Landa and Shosanna’s mind-games in Inglorious Basterds.

Conflict in a suspenseful scene can also create a conflict of emotions. Yep, we’re going full-circle with this one. For instance, when you’re watching Landa and Shosanna face-off, you don’t want Shosanna to be discovered but part of you also does to see how it pans out. A mix of dread and morbid curiosity. The experience of suspense I tried to define at the start of this article.

Pay-off

Now, whatever conflict is occurring in your suspenseful scene, there has to be a resolution. A payoff for the suspense your audience is feeling. So, the bomb finally going off. Or in Knives Out, Marta tricking Ransom into admitting the truth.

But the pay-off to a suspenseful scene doesn’t always have to be satisfying. In fact, our good friend Alfred would rather it wasn’t. One of his biggest regrets is having the bomb go off in his movie Sabotage (or Saboteur – even he gets confused which) because it gave the audience what they expected.

Similarly, in Inglorious Basterds, we don’t get the satisfaction of seeing Shosanna kill Landa. Instead, Shosanna’s plan to burn all the Nazis in her cinema succeeds but she’s killed by Zoller before she can see it through, and Landa (almost) manages to get away with it. This is frustrating for the audience but a perfectly acceptable way to pay off their suspense because at least you’ve given them an answer to their question – “What is going to happen?”