‘Look Out Behind You!’ Grounding suspense in the slasher film

Abstract

Suspense in cinema has often been described to result from either (1) the frustration of the viewers’ strong desire to know the narrative’s outcome (the uncertainty premise), or (2) the frustration of the viewers’ strong desire to use their knowledge in order to change the narrative’s outcome (the helplessness premise). In order to test the veracity of these assertions, one needs to examine the underlying mechanisms on which these cognitive frustrations (and by that the creation of suspense) rest. This paper aims to take on this task by drawing on the conceptual framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Using the subgenre of the slasher film as an exemplary case study, we show how suspense is grounded in perception in which the spatial constituents of image schemas (e.g. front, back, light, dark) are instantiated cinematically (e.g. by framing, editing, lighting) in order to structure the narrative’s conceptual constituents (e.g. the absence or presence of knowledge concerning the killer’s whereabouts).

Keywords:

• Embodied cognition
• image schema
• knowledge
• metaphor
• metonymy
• perception
• slasher film
• suspense

Notes

1. Theoretical accounts which treat uncertainty as conditional for suspense include, among others, Carroll (1996a,1996b), Chatman (1978), Gerrig (1993), Ortony, Clore, and Collins (1988), Vale (1982), Walton (1990), and Yanal (1996).

2. Illustrative in this regard is Alfred Hitchcock’s classic example, in discussion with the French director François Truffaut, of a bomb under a table: ‘We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’ In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story’ (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 73).

3. Carroll (1996b, 73) regards the paradox of suspense as a subparadox in the family of paradoxes that he entitles ‘paradoxes of recidivism’, that is ‘paradoxes that involve audiences returning to fictions whose outcomes they already know, such as mystery stories and jokes as well as suspense tales, but which they enjoy nonetheless for their being twice- (or more) told tales’.

4. This metonymy recalls Rudolf Arnheim’s concept of ‘visual thinking’: the idea that ‘no thought processes seem to exist that cannot be found to operate, at least in principle, in perception’ (1969, 14).

5. A further empirical question would be whether this quantitative correlation between the amount of extensions of image schemas and the formal density of the distinctive scene relates to the qualitative experience of the film viewing.

6. Other specific cases of this metonymy that are mentioned by Kövecses (2000, 134) are: body heat for emotion (as in ‘He did it in the heat of passion’), change in heart rate for emotion (as in ‘He entered the room with his heart in his mouth’), change in respiration for emotion (as in ‘She was heaving with emotion’), and change in the color of the face for emotion (as in ‘She colored with emotion’).

7. Carroll (1996b, 74) declares something similar when he states that suspense can occur in relation to two levels of fictional articulation: the level of ‘whole narratives’ and the level of ‘discrete scenes or sequences within a larger narrative whose overall structure may or may not be suspenseful’.

8. For other recent cases that apply the framework of CMT to the study of film see the contributions in Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2014), Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2015b), and Fahlenbrach (2016).

9. For the application of CMT to the sound design of film narratives see Fahlenbrach (2008). For the application of CMT to film music, see Chattah (2015).