Blog – Don’t show, don’t tell
There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it
I’m just going to start off my first blog and throw an Alfred Hitchcock quote in there hoping to blow your mind. When I first heard the quote from the famous movie director I felt he had a point. Think about it, how many times did you watch a movie and got vigorously Michael Bayd in the face with an explosion palooza where even the biggest fireball couldn’t wake you up from the two hour snoozefest? And how many times did you almost bite your nails off because of a potential disastrous explosion taking place in the near future that could forever eliminate the carefully layered and fleshed out main character?
Obviously, the “bang” is not always literally an explosion. It just means the feared danger actually taking place in the movie. Like where the burglar finally shows up from behind the curtain and jumps the protagonist. And the “anticipation” is simply suspense: the thrill the viewer feels knowing the burglar is behind the curtain, but he somehow chooses to lay low for just an extra wile. You know, just to mess with you while you scream “just get it over with you monster!”
In a way, the viewer himself builds up the suspension by worrying about the burglar behind the curtain. When thinking about this, I realized I really like it when the viewer gets granted a chance to build up the feeling of tension or wonder partly by himself. So when does the viewer get this chance? CLICK HERE to find out!!
Sorry, bad joke, it’s not going to be one of those websites. Let’s move on. The viewer gets this chance when visual- or background information is deliberately held back in the movie. I will give you some examples that hopefully will explain what the hell I’m actually talking about. But before you go all like: “look at this goofball acting all connoisseur with movies and making fancy shmancy analyzes”. Hold your horses. I’m about to reveal some movies I really enjoyed. And it’s not exactly going to be Inception or Citizen Kane, obviously forever crushing my chances of being regarded as a sophisticated moviegoer.
My biggest feeling of suspension when anticipating a “bang” on a visual level was with the movie Cloverfield. The movie starts out with amateur footage of some superficial yuppies having a party in New York. But, you guessed it, stuff goes haywire. The movie builds up in a way where you as a viewer get the chance to speculate about what exactly is going on, resulting in a feeling of major discomfort.
Cloverfield chooses not to hand you the visual feedback on a silver platter. It lets you anticipate the terror first, making your mind and imagination race around for a while. Later in the movie the visual silver platter does arrive however, but one very crucial element is left out for the rest of the movie: background information. Not all the pieces come together. You have to guess, resulting in your mind coming up with all kinds of scenarios, but never untangling all the knots. Not knowing is often more scary than the movie giving a lecture of what exactly is going on.
And there are more examples. I loved imagining Zion in The Matrix before they demystified it in the sequels and turned it into a ravecave. I loved not knowing exactly what that hunting alien thing was in Predator. Or like how Arnold Schwarzenegger so eloquently put it: “What the f#*% are you?” I loved how in Signs we had to wait a loong time before we actually saw what we were dealing with. And I absolutely loved guessing what that giant was surrounded by mysterious eggs in Alien. In that aspect I’m not very interested in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Those movies further lift up my beloved curtain of mystery surrounding that giant.
I think people in general are very good at worrying about insecurities in the future and making things bigger in their head than what they are in reality. Unless we went full Buddhism or Eckhart Tolle, we often experience anticipational fear instead of fear for what is occurring right at this moment. And I believe that when a movie manages to exploit that feature we have in us, it can trigger a great feeling of eeriness and suspension.
Mister Hitchcock was very early realizing that he does not have to force feed the viewer a continuous barrage of visual feedback and plot developments. Het felt comfortable giving the viewer lots of time to marinate on things and letting the audience build up the pressure themselves. Through the years we just further broadened this art of letting the moviegoer self-inflict tension or letting them create the wonders themselves, resulting in movies not revealing everything and therefore sparking everyone’s imagination.
“So that’s a nice long story Floris, but do you have some bombshell to wrap this thing up with?” Yes, I do. Cue the Disney music: every moviegoer owns an incredibly powerful imagination, often stronger than what shows on the big screen. And leaving elements out in a movie can trigger that amazing talent we all have. Because ask yourself one thing: in The Blair Witch Project, how would it have been if the witch finally showed herself in all of her CGI glory? How would it have been if it was revealed who she was, how she became such evil, her favorite colors and what her freakin’ hobbies are? Exactly, it would have been anticlimactic. I guarantee it. You made 50% of that movie yourself.