What's Your Favorite Scene of Suspense in a Movie?

Lately I have been thinking about the nature of suspense. The ways that film directors create suspense is fascinating. It can be done visually or audibly. It can be a subtle change of lighting or the sudden appearance of something unexpected. Some scenes that don’t appear suspenseful at all can suddenly take on an air of menace with a shift in the soundtrack from gentle underscore to a chilling, spine tingling screech.

In a YouTube review of the 80’s creeper flick, Hider in the House, starring Gary Busey, YouTuber Allison Pregler observed something very funny about that film’s form of suspense. In the scene, Gary Busey, playing a former mental patient hiding in the attic of a home owned by Mimi Rogers, is watching Rogers sleep from the comfort of a rocking chair in her bedroom. So comfortable is creepy Busey that he falls asleep in this scenario.

The suspense builds as sunlight fills the room. It’s morning and Creeper Busey is still asleep in that chair. Footsteps are in the hallway as Rogers’ children have awakened and are calling out for their mother. The tension of the scene is whether or not Mimi Rogers will find Creeper Busey sleeping in a chair in her bedroom but the scene is so clumsy in execution that Allison is left to wonder if we’re supposed to be afraid for our friendly Hider in the House, Creeper Busey.

Indeed, what was the director’s intent here? It’s far too early in the story for Busey to get caught so what are we meant to feel here? It’s laughable in execution as it appears to leave us in the position of fearing for our Hider as if we’re on his side. You would think that that could not possibly be the intention of the filmmakers until you hear later in Allison’s video that the film went under extensive reshoots and that there were ideas about making Creeper Busey’s Hider more sympathetic. Hollywood is freaking weird.

Back to the nature of suspense. One of my favorite sequences of suspense came in a not great movie. Russell Crowe starred in a movie about a guy who goes all road rage after getting cut off and tries to kill, was it Halle Berry? It doesn’t matter. The film opens on a terrific visual set piece. We see Russell Crowe in his car, in the rain. We see home in the middle distance. We see a gun on the seat, we see two people being intimate in the home through a window. We see Crowe reach for the gun and look at it for a moment. A light in the house shuts off. Crowe makes a decisive movement as our dread grows. He reaches for the car door, gun in hand he walks with purpose to the front door of the house, kicks open the door and shots are fired. We, via the camera, never leave the car.

Without a single word we’ve learned everything. It’s clear why this man is outside this house. That must be his wife and the man she has moved on with. The gun tells us of Crowe’s intent and since he’s the star of the movie and this is the first scene in the movie, we’re relatively sure he’s not taking his own life. The clever visual cues, the decisive acting choices of Crowe in character, all of it builds tension and suspense. Will he kill these people or not isn’t so much as tense as when he will make that decision to go and do it. When he does, it’s breathtaking. Unhinged! That's what it's called. It's a bad movie, but that sequence is terrific.

Turning the Hider in the House example on its head for a moment. One of the best films of the last decade is a movie called The Killing of Two Lovers. The opening scene in the film is a master class on suspense and how a villainous character can grow into a character we care about even as things they do are frightening and wrong. The film stars Clayne Crawford and the first time we see his character, David, he is standing in a bedroom holding a gun pointed at a sleeping couple.

A cut takes us outside the home, David crawls out the window and begins jogging down the street as the camera follows after him. We can’t tell if he has blood on him or not and at this point we don’t know if he’s committed murder. The shock and tension of these scenes is off the charts as we’re forced to wait through the credits and David’s jog up the street to the home where’s staying with his father plays out. Then David gets in his truck and drives back to the home to go through the ritual of picking up his children to take them to school. Eventually, we see his now former wife, alive and well, sending the kids off and we can breathe again.

That’s the power of a great suspense movie. The way in which it can begin with a seemingly unforgivable protagonist pointing a gun at two innocent people and end with us hoping he can pull himself together for a happy ending. That same idea doesn’t work when your character is a creep from start to finish with no arc from one spectrum to another. Gary Busey’s Hider begins the story as a creep and ends the story as a murderous, raging, creep. That’s not really an arc and certainly not a character we, as an audience, should be asked to feel anything for.

A terrifically subversive example of suspense can be found in the horror comedy, I Blame Society. In that film, a pseudo-documentary, writer-director and star, Gillian Horvat uses a documentary to explore if she were capable of planning the perfect murder. Since the movie establishes a subversive comic tone early on, when the movie becomes suspenseful, it's a kind of exciting suspense where we're forced to be on Gillian's side, even as she's clearly lost the plot, but we're kind of charged by the idea of whether or not she's actually going to kill someone.

Setting the scene, Gillian has reconnected with her former friend, Chase, a man she'd been pining for before he rejected her three years ago. The two are on a hike when their conversation becomes heated. The excitement causes Chase to have an asthma attack. At first Gillian seems concerned and is going to call for help. Then she just starts observing Chase as he struggles to breathe. Slowly, it dawns on Gillian that by not calling for help, she's committing a perfect murder. The suspense is whether Gillian, who to this point has been creepily and hilariously planning how she would murder Chase's girlfriend, will actually let Chase die or call the Police.

As an audience we're in shock as this is the same hilarious, oblivious, self involved Gillian that we've been laughing at throughout the movie. The tone of the scene is still darkly comic as their argument arose over Gillian making a documentary on how she would commit a perfect murder of Chase's girlfriend. To this point, it's all been fun and games, a bit of dark humor from a hilariously narcissistic young woman. As Chase breathes what could be his last breath, our breath catches in our throat, our eyes go wide, and we are in disbelief, gob smacked at the audacity of Gillian and the story she's telling in meta and reality.

What’s your favorite scene of suspense in a movie? Leave a comment below. Find my archive of more than 20 years and nearly 2000 movie reviews at SeanattheMovies.Blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter at PodcastSean and follow the archive blog at SeanattheMovies. Find a link for my review of The Killing of Two Lovers linked here and an article I wrote about Russell Crowe’s opening scene in Unhinged linked here. Listen to me talk about movies on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast on your favorite Podcast listening app. If you’ve enjoyed what you have read, consider subscribing to my writing here on Vocal. You can also support my writing by making a monthly pledge or leaving a one time tip. Thanks!