Writing Scary Part 1

Okay, boys and girls...the funtime is over. Dwayne Perkins has left the building, and your new substitute teachers are Alfred Hitchcock, Jonathan Demme, and William Friedkin. We're trading in the belly-laughs for the terrified, maniacal kind.

(This might have been a good day to skip class. Too late. You're already here, and no hall passes are being issued.)

I'm no Stephen King or Dean Koontz, and I'd hardly put my own work in the category of horror. But certain principles of suspense can be learned from the masters and used in different doses for different effects. The underlying principles are essentially the same regardless of whether you are going for the all-out scream or basic nervous tension to keep the pages turning.

We'll get into certain tricks and techniques in future posts, but for this one I am going to hammer the most important central point, and I'm going to hammer it into a whimpering, bloody pulp:

Character Empathy is the Most Important Element of Suspense.

Even if we take the most extreme examples of fear-inducing cinema, the ones whose visual imagery left us with nightmares--the shower sequence in Psycho, the green pea soup in The Exorcist, the face-eating attack in The Silence of the Lambs--we find that the filmmakers in each of these examples spent a tremendous amount of screen-time building characters, establishing back-stories, and creating inter-character relationships prior to the horrifying fireworks.

Indeed, if we watch each of these films with the aid of a stopwatch, we might be shocked to discover how little screen-time is actually devoted to graphic images.

Let's start with the classic that every director can agree on: Psycho.

Hitchcock threw a real curve-ball with this film: He killed his leading lady.

That was unheard-of in movies. Janet Leigh was the star of the movie. She was the name on the marquee. And Hitchcock killed off her character (Marion Crane) about one-third into the story.

As much as the suddenness and blitz-attack quality of the shower scene, this shocked audiences. And it shocked them even more because Hitchcock went to amazing lengths to develop that character. There was a complete plot in the first third of that movie, a moral crisis, a denouement, a resolution. By the time she took that ill-fated shower, we had shared her dreams of escape to a better life, worried over her decision to steal the money, sweated in the car with her when the cop was on her case, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when she finally made the decision to return to Phoenix and make things right.

In other words, we cared about Marion Crane's character. We may not have approved of all the decisions she had made, but we did understand her conflict and were able to put ourselves in her shoes.

Then Hitchcock killed her off. Just like that.

Of course, he didn't waste all that character-work. He brought in her sister as a stand-in for her character for the rest of the movie, and we transferred much of that emotional investment onto the new female lead, which allowed Hitchcock to keep working on us through the rest of the movie. Hitchcock also wasted no time in establishing the tension between the sister and the victim's boyfriend.

But whether we're talking about the Marion Crane story arc, or the Clarisse-Starling-amibitious-West-Virginia-orphan-backstory, or the Damien-Karras-crisis-of-faith-how-could-you-fail-your-ailing-mother-backstory, in every one of these films, the directors went out of their ways to make us care about the characters. Part of this is basic storytelling, of course: We're supposed to care about the characters. But part of this is simply basic suspense creation:

Although suspense can be heightened with atmospherics, tricks and devices, real fear depends on the reader's emotional investment in the characters.

Next stop: Horror versus Suspense