First, let me say that I am terrible with horror movies. Really bad. My mother would routinely laugh every time I left the room and went to bed rather than watch X Files with her and my cousin. The one time I let my friends take me to the movies for my birthday, they chose The Grudge. That was the last time my friends took me to the movies for my birthday. I watched "It" through a crack between couches. Yet I have read probably 90% of Stephen King's books. Yes, that Stephen King. "From A Buick 8" peeks at me from the shelf as I speak. So why am I a fan of these and not the movies?
The stuff I am drawn to is not shock. After all these years, stuff jumping out in your face is still effective. Annoying, and effective to the point of feeling cheap, but effective. If I know that throwing something in your face is the easiest way to get you to jerk, why would I do anything but that? It has led to some of the most successful Halloween movies being simply a guy creeping in a dark hallway, a shape moving quickly, a deadly attack and a scream. That's fine, and if you make those movies, keep raking in that money. What I am drawn to is suspense. We must refer to one A. Hitchcock on this subject. He believed in the art of keeping one drawn into the scene emotionally with his stories rather than just scared. It was more of an emotional spectrum. This interview is one of the best ways to explain how his creative process worked, where he explains how he would set up a scene. In another interview, he explains that, to him, the actual facts of the movie are meaningless. What is important, he says, is how the story is told.
Which brings us to Stephen King. What he manages to do with his books is, bluntly, genius. He melds the otherworldly with the mundane at such a level that it becomes less scary and more fascinating. Concepts that would otherwise die pretty quickly in anyone else's hands become magic. I think part of it is because he works in so much day to day life that one cares about the individual in general, and not just how grisly of a kill they will make. It is a fine line to walk without losing the edge of the story or becoming cheesy, yet he pulls it off time and again. Put a person you meet for five minutes in danger, yes, your instinct would be to be concerned. Put someone you have known for a year in the same danger and it becomes way more crucial.
Even in games, some companies are able to generate this emotional response. Mass Effect 2, for example, universally regarded as one of the best games of our time, if not all time, earns such platitudes by taking a page from Hitchcock. In the face of death on the horizon, day to day activities take on new meaning and are soaked in suspense. ME2 works this by telling you at the start that at the end of the game, you will be going on a suicide mission that no one expects you to come back from. You have to build a team of agents that will work with you, and sorting out their personal troubles before the end feels very ominous, like the prisoner on death row clearing his conscience before death. By the end, when people start falling, it becomes much more significant that these people are dying.
However, death is not the only tool of the artist who wishes to create suspense. The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite TV shows, and while they tend away from Hitchcock style techniques, their ability to create tension without death is a testament to their skill. Probably the most well known episode is Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Young William Shatner sits at the window seat of his plane and watches as a gremlin tears at the wing, yet disappears whenever he tries to point it out to anyone else. If the gremlin were on the loose in the plane biting people, I would have lost interest rapidly, as would most people. However, it is done far better than that and by the end you are wondering if it was a nightmare or reality. I won't spoil the end itself for you but it is a fine piece of fiction.
So, going to watch a movie? Pause for a while and check out some Twilight Zone, or some old Hitchcock movies. More than one way to get the blood pumping.
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