The difference between “surprise” and “suspense,” according to Alfred Hitchcock
It goes without saying that Alfred Hitchcock is the greatest purveyor of suspense in cinema history. After all, every director who came along after Hitch to ply their trade in thrillers, horror movies, and action films is indebted to his incredible knack for staging sequences so suspenseful they’re almost unbearable to watch. This influence may even be subconscious because, for example, any filmmaker heavily influenced by Brian De Palma is, in turn, influenced by Hitchcock, because De Palma openly worshipped at the altar of the ‘Master of Suspense’ for years.
To Hitchcock, suspense was pure cinema, and he revelled in keeping audiences on the edge of their seats. He was adamant that it was his job to convey storytelling elements in such a way that the visuals implanted in the mind of the audience, informing how they viewed a scene, as opposed to simply making a spectacular or grotesque visual statement. While certainly capable of creating memorable imagery, the latter technique removed the audience by turning them into spectators, whereas his preferred method drew audiences in.
Hitchcock characterised this difference in approach as the thing that separated “surprise” from “suspense.” The iconic director once explained, “I prefer to suggest something and let the audience figure it out. The big difference between suspense and shock or surprise is that in order to get suspense, you provide the audience with a certain amount of information and leave the rest of it to their own imagination.”
The shower scene in Psycho is a perfect example of what Hitchcock is talking about here. However, in his seminal series of interviews with French filmmaker François Truffaut, he expertly illustrated the vast difference between surprise and suspense with the perfect thought exercise: a seemingly innocent conversation between two people sitting at a table.
“Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us,” Hitchcock mused, setting up the basis for his lesson. If a director is simply aiming for surprise with this scene, the people at the table will talk for a while. Then, suddenly, the bomb will explode, shocking the audience because they had no idea there was even an explosive device underneath the table at all. “The public is surprised,” Hitchcock notes, “but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.”
However, if a director takes Hitchcock’s approach to the very same scene, it transforms into something that will fray the audience’s nerves. In this incarnation, the audience sees an anarchist place the bomb under the table before the characters, who are none the wiser, even sit down. Hitchcock would also be inclined to let the audience know the bomb will explode at 1pm, and then, brilliantly, he would show a clock nearby that reads 12:45.
“In these conditions, this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene,” Hitchcock explains. “The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen, ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!’ In the first case, we have given the public 15 seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second, we have provided them with 15 minutes of suspense.”
Ultimately, the key to separating surprise from suspense is all about the information revealed to the characters in the film versus the information shown to the audience. If aiming for surprise, the audience should know less than the people in the movie about what is truly going on, but if aiming for suspense, the audience must be a couple of steps ahead of the characters. We need to know what is coming if the oblivious characters don’t figure it out in time, because that is what generates the delicious tension Hitchcock was so synonymous with.
