Alfred Hitchcock Use Of Suspense Essay

“Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen…” as Alfred Hitchcock would start any speech introducing his films. For those of you who do not know who he is, Hitchcock is and always will be the one man who changed the course of the film industry with new typesof thriller and horror. Hitchcock managed through his technical skills to transform what is ordinary into the unusual. Dialogue ceased to be the primary element of film. The camera outweighed the dialogue.for him there is a great difference between surprise and suspense. In almost all his movies the closeups and the perspective camera angles create a sense of unbearable and intolerable suspense. What is tempting about his movies is that the view is always subjective from the actor’s point of view making the audience biased to what the character is experiencing. The long periods of silence and speeding actions build up the suspense even further. His movies gave rise to a new sort of film- thriller. Hitchcock devised two principles in his movies. The first being the use of famous landmarks as a backdrop for the suspense scenes and the second is his appearance in the movie. All of this just proves Hitchcock is not only a genius-in its true meaning- but

one of the most important elements of suspensehe used is the right Position of the Camera to provide the appropriate perspective upon which the audience will evaluate the characters. What greatly affected the notion of suspense is the use of Light by providing little or no light in the scene it can be understood differrently from a scene with intense lighting. Another thing is the use of sounds. Hitchcock’s only used sounds in his movies at the extreme need. He used tochoose silence to stressand increase the suspense. What Hitchcock focused on the most is use of bright terrifying colors and scary music such as in his one of the famous movies Psycho to mislead the