How to Create Suspense in Films | Horror & Psychological Thrillers

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Psychological Thrillers: How to Create Suspense in Films. Here are 5 of my best tips for writing for suspense in your thriller, drama, or horror videos. Let’s go!

1 Character Conflict
One way to build suspense is to create a sense of rising conflict in your story. The main character or characters should be ones that your audience can relate to. Then create a powerful opposing force. This will hook the audience in for the ride, subconsciously rooting for the protagonists. But In order for this to work perfectly, main characters should experience both a rising conflict as well as some conflict resolution, even if it's not a happy ending. Your audience will be mostly drawn in as the situation becomes increasingly tense.

In our recent horror short film, we built rising conflict through our team members disappearances, and conflict resolution through one our own secretly being the opposing force.

2 Time your reveal.
Building suspense is all about giving the right amount of information slowly to create an emotional arc. Each piece of info you give to your viewers clue them in to whats happening. And Everything you write should either give information about the character, or about the story to move it forward towards the reveal. For instance, in our recent horror short film we waited until the VERY end to reveal that the cause of our team’s disappearance: Our friend Alex was conspiring against us with a creature in the forest. If we didn’t wait to reveal the twist, there would have been no rising conflict before the conflict resolution. When you watch the film for a second time you may notice that Alex was the one directing our team on camera, only slightly hinting that she was the one directing our demise. A perfectly timed twist satisfies the audience’s expectations of conflict resolution, at exactly the right moment.

3 Build Expectation
This tip ties in with timing your reveal. To create suspense, your audience needs a sense that something is about to happen, that there's an expectation of trouble. In our horror film, we built expectation incrementally through having team members disappear one by one. This helps give the sense of rising tension, ultimately leading to the big reveal.

4 Disrupt Your Shot Length
This next tip has to do with how you edit for suspense. Nowadays, people are used to how movie stories are told, they're used to many years going by within a few scenes but also used to just a few minutes going by almost in real time. Actually, most narratives are created using an average length of 2 seconds per shot. So to build suspense, you could use longer takes at key moments to make the audience uneasy. Likewise, if you’re story is made up of longer shots, using shorter ones towards the climax of a scene would also help to build tension.

5 Sound Design
Some movies like Inception and the Exorcist seem to have an extra degree of suspense. But there's actually a bit of musical magic to them. And the magic surrounds a science-based audio illusion called a Shepard tone. The tones are constantly moving upwards or downwards but they never seem to reach their end. This effect can be accomplished with sound effects like risers like this one *play sound and with dark music playing ascending or descending scales on a continuous loop, like this *. Use the music or sound effects during tense scenes to further enhance the suspense. But don’t listen to Shepherd tones too long, or you might lose your mind!

Thanks so much for watching. Hope these tips help you keep your audience on the edge of their seats. Remember, these tips are not just for horror or thriller movies. These tricks can even be applied to your YouTube videos. So please subscribe if you haven't already, we’re uploading filmmaking tutorials every week!