Suspense Versus Surprise: Hitchcock’s Number One Rule by Craig Hammill

Next Saturday, April 8, 2023, we return to our year long The Master: Alfred Hitchcock series with two of his clever investigations into the mysteries of matrimony veiled as mass entertainments: 1941’s Suspicion and 1964’s Marnie.  And from there, you’ll be getting a Hitchcock double, at the very least, monthly through the end of the year.

One of Hitch’s most fundamental realizations was that suspense is vastly preferable in cinema to surprise. A lesson that surprisingly few filmmakers have really been able to put into practice at the level Hitchcock perfected over fifty years ago.

What Hitchcock meant roughly could be summed up in his explanation of the difference to Francois Truffaut in their groundbreaking book of interviews Hitchcock-Truffaut. To paraphrase (maybe poorly), suspense is when you show CHARACTER A placing the bomb underneath the table, setting the timer to five minutes, starting it, leaving the room, and then having CHARACTERS B and C, for whom you care deeply, come in the room unaware of the bomb, and talking blithely about the weather.

We KNOW the bomb is going to go off in less than five minutes. Characters B and C do not. And so we, the audience, get more and more nervous and on their edges of our seats as we get closer to that horrible moment.

BUT. . .and this was the key, Hitchcock felt, the bomb can not, ultimately go off. Or at least, it can’t kill the two characters you love.

Surprise, on the other hand, would be to have Characters B and C come into the room and talk blithely about the weather and five minutes later have a bomb go off nobody knew about. It would be a surprise for sure. But you would have lost the opportunity of five minutes of rich, dramatically ironic scene craft.

Hitch once did this very sequence as he laid out in his British picture Sabotage. But he made the cardinal mistake (so he felt) of having the bomb go off and kill the little boy unknowingly acting as courier who held it in his arms.  He ultimately felt that was too cruel and though the boy had to die for the latter part of the movie’s plot to kick into gear, he should have done it off screen and not as a sequence.

Now, this writer feels that all good rules can and should, on occasion, be broken. But as this writer gets older, he also feels there’s a good bit of wisdom to the old chestnut that you need to truly understand the rules before you can break them correctly.

Hitchcock proved this himself when he made Psycho. The famous shower sequence which happens roughly only 1/3 of the way into the picture is a total surprise (for anyone who doesn’t know it’s coming). Hitch seems to be violating his number one rule.

BUT. . .he then uses this surprise which pulls the carpet totally out from the audience’s feet and announces that all bets are off for the rest of the movie as the INFORMATION that lays the groundwork for ALL the suspense that occurs in the movie’s final hour.

From the moment of the shower murder to the end of the movie, we KNOW far more than almost any character in the movie. And thus whenever anyone new comes to the Bates Motel, we powerlessly want to shout “No! Stop! Get out!” But can’t.

In fact, the Bates’ Home, which stands at the top of the hill like some horrible gateway to hell, becomes so charged with unknown terror, that when any of the other main characters enter it in the second half of the movie, we can barely keep from closing our eyes, running out of the theater, begging them to get out immediately.

There are a number of key and classic examples of Hitchcock’s number one rule of suspense throughout his body of work that produced all-time great sequences.

In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), we know from the very beginning of the movie that returning Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) is a killer of rich widows. Thus everything in the movie is about watching the character we care most about, young niece Charlie (Teresa Wright) come to the horrible realization that her beloved Uncle is a murderous psychopath.

In Strangers on a Train (1951), we again know from the very start of the movie who has done the killing. And because it is not our hero whom everyone suspects, it makes his plight all the more painful and piquant because we see just how screwed he is unless he can prove otherwise.

Most of Hitchcock’s innocent person on the run masterpieces (The 39 Steps, Saboteur, North by Northwest) tell us everything in the first act so that the tension becomes NOT if our lead is innocent but if they will be able to PROVE their innocence and (often) stop a greater crime before it is too late.

It’s instructive to see the moviemakers after Hitchcock who truly understood this principle. Chief among them, no surprise, is Steven Spielberg who repeatedly would give the audience ALL the information they needed about a sequence or danger so that they could fully come to care for the endangered characters imminently about to experience harm.

In Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, Munich we know everything from the very start of the movie. Thus the suspense sequences become much more about if characters we love will come out of it or die.

Maybe even more impressive is that even though we all came to know Spielberg’s sensibility and good heartedness, we never ceased to wait with baited breath anytime he would craft a suspense sequence.

Surprise has its place as well. This writer isn’t going to rob movies of that thrill when a danger pops out of the dark and goes “Boo!”.

But look at how a director like Jonathan Demme in The Silence of the Lambs gets way more mileage out of his final sequence by giving the audience ALL the information (we know this is the killer Buffalo Bill even if Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling initially does not) up front. The sequence becomes almost unbearable. . .and delicious and amazing.

Martin Scorsese has always said “Learn from the old masters”.  Not “Copy the old masters”. But “learn from the old masters”.  Each new generation of moviemakers should absolutely feel the license to be fearless in being iconoclastic. But that iconoclasm sticks and endures when, like Picasso or Hitchcock, you know the basic fundamentals in the first place.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.