Tension Building Quotes

I love scary movies and respect the filmmakers of scary movies, and it's just as hard to make a great scary movie as it is to make a great comedy or drama or anything else.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

McQueen is an astonishing film maker. He uses really unusual shots and builds incredible dramatic tension.

Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.

I love thrillers. I've never made them, but I would say a really good thriller is my favorite kind of a movie. If I can get a really great thriller, you know.

I'm not a fan of horror. I don't think a proper horror movie has been done since The Shining.

For me, suspense is always harder and better than going for the quick, outright scare.

I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun.

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

I find that usually when I watch something like horror film, I'm constantly thinking no, it's not going to happen.

The key to a good horror movie is what happens between the scares. The scares aren't the tricky part. If you're involved in what's going on in between, the scare is going to trick you. If you're not, the best scare in the world will not be scary.

I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.

I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.

There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.

If you're making a horror film, it's very important that you have lots of quiet, suspensey, don't-know-what's-happening stuff before you get the big fright.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

I think crafting a new, effective horror movie is not just about when night falls and things get scary. It's about setting a tone and mood that permeates throughout the entire movie. So even during the daytime, things are never quite safe-feeling.

Sound design is always critical, especially when you're doing a thriller with a lot of suspense and tension.

Raaz 3' has a human touch and in fact, horror comes in third place. The first is human touch, while music takes the second place.

There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.

When you're making music or playing a song, I find the moments when there are no instruments being played even stronger than when they are being played. Because they add tension. It's also an ego-less thing - a place where you have no ego - when you're with a bunch of musicians who stop and listen instead.

The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

The scares are the easier part of scary movies. The hard part of scary movies is what leads up to the scares.