Suspense Building Quotes

I'm interested in the human more than I'm interested in building suspense.

I'm a visual filmmaker so the camera is a big part of my storytelling tool and it's something that I really rely on to tell a scene or create the suspense that I need and create the emotion of a scene or a sequence.

I think that the joke and the ghost story both have a similar set up in that you kind of set something up and pay it off with a laugh or a scare.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

Something like 'Psycho,' which is this psychological thing that slowly, slowly, slowly builds, and actually it's a much more powerful reaction you have when it assumes that you're intelligent as you're watching it. I want them to make me believe that whatever's happening could really happen, and then it becomes much more frightening.

Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.

Without psychology, the horror film doesn't exist.

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.

First lead [in a movie] requires a different approach like trying not to give it all away in the first scene. It is a skill, a learned skill.

I think the way to create a lot of terror in a haunted house film is to have a bunch of people who have no idea what's happening to them, and you sort of live the movie through their eyes.

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

For the really scary stuff to work at the end you have to fall in love a little bit with the family and want then to be ok. And once you get the audience to buy in on that then they care. They want them to be okay.

When you create those characters that people love and care about and put them in a dark hallway, already the audience is on edge, and they feel empathy for that character. Then it's up to me to decide what jumps out in that hallway. So I think laying that foundation of strong characters and strong story is the most important thing in a horror film.

When I'm filming a kill scene [as a director], I just get happier and happier as we chop up body parts.

It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more." Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.

I've made movies on every part of the spectrum, and you do understand when you go into certain movies that you're trying to elicit a certain kind of response from the audience, and people get a real sense of satisfaction when they're rooting for a character and the character pulls it off.

I think about the movie 'Jaws.' They had this state-of-the-art animatronic shark, but it kept breaking down, which kept delaying the filming. So, they had to use it very sparingly, but it became why the film was so good because you never saw the shark. You only heard about it, and it was suggested.

You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.

As a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.

Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.

In a certain way, sometimes it does feel like we say goodbye to a character, and we don't want to bring them back unless we have a good reason. We left the door open if we wanted to use him more. I always think it's better to leave the audience wanting more.

For me it's about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I'm not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.

All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious.