Keith Bound MA is a suspense consultant at Receptive Cinema, based at the University of Nottingham. His research is helping academics to define 'suspense' in film and filmmakers to create even scarier, more suspenseful content. With Halloween and Broadway's Mayhem Film Festival just around the corner, here's a taste of Keith's fascinating insights into horror to get you in the mood! We'll be interviewing Keith very soon too, to find out more about the man behind Receptive Cinema and his work as an international award-winning designer and innovator.
Why does suspense matter?
The digital revolution of the 21st century has changed people's viewing experience. No longer are we seeing feature films confined just to cinemas or TV screens. People are consuming video content on smaller screens, and on these devices they’ve got e-mail, messages and apps. As a result, the narrative flow people would normally see in a film is being broken up, and this disruption is distracting people from what the story is about. Stories need to be more engaging, and suspense is a key engagement process - something that’s true across all genres, though more pronounced in horror.
The average camera shot has also become shorter in its duration thanks to technological changes. In the 1940s it was nine seconds, by 1999 it was three seconds and it’s probably even less than that now. This can also divert attention and lead to poor story comprehension when the viewer is exposed to a high frequency of short camera shots during an action scene. All these competing influences from digital technology are really impacting how we might experience suspense, so having a better understanding of what the viewer goes through is essential. If we can understand this, we can engage them more deeply in the story world.
Although major film studios have taken advantage of measuring brain activity to gain reliable, real-time understanding of the moviegoer experience, neuroscientists create a generic measure of emotional engagement and don’t have the storytelling skills to improve viewer engagement and story comprehension in films. This retrospective process also increases film production costs and time-to market. With suspense being a core viewer engagement mechanism by creating a valid definition of the viewers’ experience of suspense which can be measured, we could maximise suspense, improve viewer engagement and story comprehension.
Do different kinds of suspense exist?
Though there’s been very little research into suspense in recent years - besides a glut of it from media psychologists in the mid-90s - Susan Smith’s textual analysis of films by Alfred Hitchcock successfully defined three types of suspense. The first is vicarious suspense. This form of suspense is where the viewer is privileged with information about a protagonist who themselves are unaware of the danger; think a shot of a monster creeping up on an unsuspecting victim. There’s also direct suspense. This occurs when the audience is ‘alone’, like if a camera looks into a dark room, for instance. It’s seeing the film in the first person point-of-view as if we were a character in the film. Finally, there’s shared suspense which is the most predominant narrative structure we see. Shared suspense builds empathy with a fictional character. For example, when the protagonists life is being threatened by the antagonist the viewer shares suspense with the protagonist as they are concerned for their safety. If empathy, is not built successfully suspense will be dramatically reduced and impact viewer engagement.
But these types of suspense aren’t exclusive. Smith also found that they can work side-by-side as a composite form of suspense or synchronised together as a hybrid form of suspense.
What exactly happens when we experience suspense?
Suspense is primarily a form of anxiety that produces physiological responses. Once the viewer experiences a fear stimulus it creates muscular tension, shivers sent down the spine and goose bumps. Another physiological response is skin conductance, electrical changes in the skin producing emotional sweating. When we watch a fear stimulus in a film and become anxious, the amygdala (fear response centre) in the limbic system of the brain instinctively mobilises a complex neural network, activating the sympathetic nervous system, hence why we sweat when we get stressed. Emotional sweating is measurable at people’s fingertips, where the eccrine sweat glands are densely populated. This is what makes it a psychophysiological response; it’s a physiological change - sweating in this case - interpreted through a behavioural or psychological output to the fear stimulus - a feeling of being scared.
In a recent study ‘Psychophysiological suspense: defining a framework to measure cinematic suspense in 21st century horror films’ 27 participants watched a 32 film-clip sequence. The sequence was made up of four generic suspense story structures (various, direct, shared and composite suspense) from eight different horror films, with each short film clip, covering one suspense story structure. The film selection criteria formed a lengthy process, but each film was post-2000 horror and fitted a sub-genre category of either supernatural, zombie, home invasion or science fiction.
The study found that vicarious suspense produced the strongest physiological responses, in terms of anxiety durability and intensity - confirming Hitchcock’s assumption that an audience feels suspense most intensely when they’re privileged with information that the protagonist is unaware of. Another factor that was crucial to a film eliciting a strong form of suspense was dependant on how story structures, narrative elements and cinematic techniques conceal, delay or reveal story information to the viewer and/or fictional characters. This evidence from the study found that Hitchcock’s assumption that the viewer needs to have all the information to experience suspense wasn’t correct. There are lots of instances where filmmakers use light and dark effectively, along with other cinematic techniques, revealing only snippets of information. The forty second film clip in the study Quarantine, for example, takes place in a pitch black room home to a zombie. Although we don’t see the antagonist (zombie), we hear noises – concealing and delaying visual information about the antagonist’s identity and the threat posed to the protagonist in the scene which increased suspense as a result.
We also noticed that a close-up of a zombie or a monster’s face is less likely to make people feel scared. They don’t feel suspense and even their physiological responses can die away. Seeing real people in pain or scared, through shared suspense on the other hand, served to drive more anxiety as they empathise for their predicament. The study also showed what didn’t work. In Silent House, for example, a clip in a dark room failed to create much suspense because the audience never saw the protagonist. There was also a lack of visual story information and viewers got wise to what was happening; if an image flickered on screen, it was going to be scary - they’d got used to the pattern
How can these findings be applied?
The outcomes from the research form a psychophysiological model of suspense where viewer anxiety responses to horror films can be predicted. The research findings offer a cutting edge innovative framework for storytelling. We’ve normalised the results; we know the duration of the suspense created by clips, and also the strength based on viewer anxiety responses. This allows us to create a model of what effectively causes feelings of suspense, in terms of cinematic and narrative elements. And while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution applicable, we can understand which techniques work in different situations more effectively than what someone might think from a purely creative perspective. This involves selecting specific story structures, narrative elements and cinematic techniques (cinematography, sound, editing, and production design) that will produce different types of anxiety responses. We can then create patterns of suspense across a feature film, during a scene or elicit a strong form of suspense in seconds. Viewer absorption in the story world increases because the filmmaking process improves story comprehension and ensures suspense is maintained at an optimum levels. It could be a case of working with a script, storyboard, during pre-production, giving two or three options for optimum suspense to a director/producer or editor during post production. And that’s what this research can do, bringing filmmaking and science together as one.
There’s also exciting opportunities outside of filmmaking. The findings could easily be applied to transmedia storytelling, using suspense to engage people through short films clips, text, voice and image messaging and the web. This is particularly significant as horror films increasingly extend into franchises. The findings are also applicable to experiential horror - whether that’s in theme parks or in standalone ‘scary experiences’. It could be as simple as a dark room where people go to experience the thrill of a fright, using cinematic aspects like lighting and sound to increase suspense, using a device to make the experience even more engrossing.
