The Art of Suspense

Nobody can do suspense like Alfred Hitchcock. Almost every film of his would qualify as an edge-of-the-seat viewing experience: Notorious, Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, Spellbound—the list goes on. French filmmaker Francois Truffaut calls Hitchcock a complete filmmaker, and classifies him among such artists of anxiety as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Poe. The French director in 1962 embarked on an intensive series of interviews (involving 500 questions) with the Englishman on his career, and compiled these into a book entitled Hitchcock/Truffaut.

How did Hitchcock do it? Create the suspense? For suspense to work, the audience must be in the know even before the character—that dictum Hitchcock followed religiously. In the interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock points out that whenever possible, inform the audience about the bad thing that’s going to happen—the bomb under the table, the villain about to enter the room where the heroine is searching for evidence of the murder—before the character knows about it. In Rear Window, a war photographer (James Stewart) breaks his leg and is confined to his Greenwich Village flat in New York. He is reduced to looking out of his window at his neighbours’ flats and making up stories about their lives. He suspects one of the neighbours of having murdered his (the neighbour’s) wife. Grace Kelly, Stewart’s socialite girlfriend volunteers to search the flat for the victim’s wedding ring, and while she is in there, the murderer-husband returns unexpectedly. We see this from the photographer’s flat. Grace doesn’t know she is in danger, but we and James Stewart do, and that heightens the tension and suspense.

At the same time, Hitchcock also adheres to the rule—give the viewer as little information as possible, but enough for them to exercise their imagination. His 1943 film, Shadow of a Doubt is an excellent example of
this technique.

A suspected serial killer retreats to his sister’s house in a small town in Middle America to escape the police who are chasing him. “Disquietingly subversive”—one critic called it. A typical American small town, apple pie and mums, cheery policemen helping people cross the road, and a psycho killer in their midst: their beloved uncle Charlie. The two detectives on his trail show up but they are not yet sure he is their man. The whole film is a cat-and-mouse game between the uncle and the niece who is initially ecstatic about her namesake and beloved uncle’s visit. But after learning from the detective that Uncle Charlie may be a serial killer, her initial defence turns to dismay as the uncle begins to behave erratically. If you watch the film with the time ticking below on the screen, then you find that only in the 54th minute of the 1-hour-50-minute film, we know for sure what the crime was. Until then, we are fed teasers—a waltz where the figures are blurred, a newspaper article on a murder, and two men on Charlie’s trail. We are shown all these, but not told anything else.

We know for sure only at the 1:13 minute mark (more than halfway through the film) that Uncle Charlie is the killer the police are after. Until then, all we know is that this silent, brooding, cold man (Joseph Cotton plays him brilliantly in the film) has taken a train to his sister’s house and is being followed by two men. Then in his sister’s house, he hides the newspaper—again we don’t know why but we suspect it is because of something he has done. He presents his niece with a ring, and on the inside rim are the initials of another woman. A waltz and an article about a murder is all we need to think that Uncle Charlie has murdered a woman. To have such magnificent restraint, and trust the audience enough to let the viewer come up with it ourselves—that’s Hitchcock at his best.

The dialogue is plain and effective, repeated in different registers, moving from light-hearted repartee to menacing overtones. We are like twins, the niece tells her beloved uncle at the beginning, and in the middle of the film the uncle, now exposed as the serial killer, repeats it to his niece. Hitchcock, though, thinks that dialogue ought to be minimal and to the point. He has the unique ability to film the thoughts of his characters and make them perceptible without resorting to dialogue—for which European filmmakers like Truffaut revered him. Such a dramatic mood further heightens emotions. As Truffaut points out, Hitchcock’s cinema absorbs the audience so completely that the viewer is also the participant; his films are a three-way game in which the audience, too, is required to play.

Another tool in Hitchcock’s toolkit is the theme. “The theme of an innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger. It’s easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run.” To make the audience connect with the story, Hitchcock’s heroes tend to be ordinary men—well, more Cary Grant and James Stewart kind of ordinary—caught up in an extraordinary situation, with all the circumstantial evidence working against him. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, a British couple travelling in Switzerland with their daughter witnesses the assassination of a Frenchman who, before he dies, tells them about a plot to murder a foreign diplomat in London. In The 39 Steps, a young Canadian whom the police are chasing for the crime, goes to Scotland in pursuit of a spy ring that has stabbed a woman to death in his flat. In North by Northwest, an advertising executive is wrongly identified as a spy by an enemy espionage group and becomes a target for pursuit and is trapped in circumstances that make it impossible for him to turn to the police.

The use of contrast is another element in Hitchcock’s arsenal to create suspense. Think of an innocent man isolated in the middle of a crowd—that is used brilliantly by Hitchcock to increase the sense of menace and helplessness. The hero is often trapped in a music hall, an auction sale, a music concert, a political rally, or a ballroom. It sets up a contrast within the scenario. For instance, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, James Stewart tells a policeman in Albert Hall that an ambassador is about to be shot, but he is dismissed as a crank.

But none of these tools of suspense would work unless the audience connects emotionally and feels the plight of the main character, and that is where Hitchcock excels. Emotion, for Hitchcock, is an essential ingredient of suspense. Not for him the whodunnits of Agatha Christie, which he dismisses as having an intellectual puzzle and generating a kind of curiosity that is void of emotion.

In fact, Hitchcock succeeds in making the audience sympathises even with a psychopath (like Uncle Charlie).
When Truffaut asks how Hitchcock accomplished this feat, the great filmmaker replied that it was because Uncle Charlie was a killer with an ideal. “He’s one of those murderers who feel that they have a mission to destroy…What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white; there are greys everywhere.” That touch of humanity enhances the suspense in the films.

Ironically, this filmmaker who excels in filming murder, death and the abnormal, confesses that he himself is full of fears. It adds that extra dimension of authenticity to his craft of suspense-making. This artist of anxiety’s mission, thus, is to share with us the anxieties that haunt him. Creating suspense is his way of helping us plumb our own anxieties and understand ourselves, thus fulfilling the fundamental purpose of any work of art.

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