Things You Can't See: How Horror Movies Put Us On Edge
Halloween is coming, so here's a question: What's the scariest thing in horror movies?
Is it zombies? Vampires? Ghosts?
The answer might just be "none of those things." For some people, there's something much scarier: suspense.
It's that feeling of anxiety or uncertainty about what's going to happen. And in movies, suspense isn't really about what you see on the screen — it's often about what you can't see.
For example, in the 1978 film Halloween, the audience knows that the killer Michael Myers is somewhere in the town of Haddonfield. But he is very rarely seen — so the audience doesn't know when he will attack!
The director Alfred Hitchcock was sometimes called "the master of suspense." And he said in a 1964 interview with the BBC: "I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen."
Hitchcock also created suspense by letting the audience see things his characters could not — such as in the famous shower scene in Psycho, where the audience could see that the door had opened behind Janet Leigh's character, but she could not.
Music can also create suspense. John Carpenter, who directed and wrote the music for Halloween, said that hearing discordant sounds — like Halloween's famous piano music — can put the audience on edge.
But he told The Quietus that he also values the power of silence. It's about creating a mood, he said.
Sometimes, the setting of a scene is enough to build suspense.
The director of the 1998 film Ring, Hideo Nakata, told the website Offscreen that he likes to "present the fearful side of nature itself."
For example, he said he shot part of Ring on the Japanese island of Oshima "where there was a very bad or unnatural feeling in the air."
So, as Hitchock said, the horror isn't what's happening on the screen — it's the feeling in the audience's mind!
