let em play God

We were given a sheet in lesson about Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. He was born on August 13th 1899 in Leytonstone London, and died on April 29th 1980 in Los Angeles at the age of 80. He wrote an article about how to create supense and what it really is. 

His article is called thrills, suspense, the audience'. In this article Hitchcock talks about how every mystery movie makers aim is to have the audience at the edge of their seats the technique involved in doing this is suspense. According to Hitchcock suspense is created when you let the audience play God. If they are unaware whether a character is a hero or villain they will not know whether to rejoice or not rejoice. Hitchcock says if the audience have been told all the secrets that the character dont no, “they’ll work like the devil for you because they know what fate is facing the poor actors”. He describes this as “Playing God”.

Hitchcock believes that when characters are not convincing you only get suprise but not suspense. He also believes that inorder for suspense to be created, you do not need effects such as shadows, stormy/dull weather and creaky doors; his movie ‘Rope’ was evidence for this point. As Hitchcock became more interested in developing his suspense techniques, he chose to shoot these type of stories exclusively; this conclusion came by the time he had made his movies‘Secret Agent' ,‘Sabotage’, and ‘The 39 Steps’.