"There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise" with Bilge Ebiri

Hey folks, I'm Michael Phillips and this is The Movie Racket, our 13th episode.

That's more movies than Ma and Pa Kettle Made, more than Bamba the Jungle Boy. But the Bowery Boys movies with Slip and Satch, they made 48 of those, so we do have a ways to go. But we're at lucky number 13, perfect for Halloween week. And to tempt fate, I'm recording this intro while sitting underneath a ladder waiting for a black cat to cross my path. It's a good week to talk about Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense and all that. Now, The adjective Hitchcockian has turned up in, I'm guessing, thousands of film reviews written long after the director died in 1980. And I don't know if that adjective means a damn thing, really, because it has been misapplied, I think, to so many films in

the horror, thriller, and suspense genres for decades. And can you really apply that same word, Hitchcockian, to work of his that has little in common with other films he made? Is Rear Window really all that much like Psycho or Notorious or Shadow of a Doubt or North by Northwest? Today, we're digging into something Hitchcock mentioned a lot in his official autumnal years after he'd become the most famous director on the planet. He talked about it on The Dick Cavett Show. He talked about it, certainly, to his fellow director and great admirer, Francois Truffaut, in the 1962 interviews with Truffaut conducted with Hitchcock that became the great essential book Hitchcock Truffaut, and later the Kent Jones documentary, a

really good one, about how those interviews came together as Hitchcock was filming his latest project, The Birds, and Truffaut was already an international filmmaking star on the rise, thanks to The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim and others. As a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut championed Hitchcock in ways the U.S. and even the British critics did so only up to a point. After all, wasn't this director sort of unseemly, it seemed to so many, for just being a clever publicity hound? Just kind of a shockmeister at his basest instincts? Out for kicks? My guest this week and I aren't really compelled by the question of how serious or frivolous Hitchcock was. We started our conversation...

with Hitchcock's simple assertion that, quote, there is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise. True enough. Is it also true that suspense beats surprise 99 times out of 100? That was Hitchcock's implication. And the fact is, Hitchcock was haunted by what he called a grave error in a movie he made decades before he talked with Truffaut or with Dick Cavett. in his British sound period. The movie was and is a really good one, Sabotage, released in 1936.

We talk about this arguable grave error and its implications and how it might have set Hitchcock's standards for why suspense was far superior to shock in many ways. This week's guest is the film critic Bilga Abiri. a longtime presence on the staff of Vulture and New York Magazine, and formerly the film critic of The Village Voice. We talked about Hitchcock's legacy in relation to the directors who have brought something of Hitchcock's knack for suspense and surprise to their own work, but in a new way. Suspense, shock, and a jolt to remember. So, after this tense, inexplicable pause, I'm going to say very suddenly, Let's go!

There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. Excellent. That's such a terrible impression.

Bilge, thanks for jumping on this edition of the Movie Racket and taking on this Hitchcock quote that you just read beautifully in the Hitchcock voice as heard by you. Good job. This has kind of rolled around in my head ever since I read this particular part of the ongoing Hitchcock-Truffaut conversation in the great book from the 60s when Truffaut sat in 1962 for that initial series of interviews.

And then we have later on and more recently the Kent Jones documentary about how these tapes formed history. the basis of the book, and really just a great window into two great filmmakers at different points in their careers. And this idea that there's a distinct difference between suspense and surprise. Hitchcock's example, which we can go into a little bit when we talk about Sabotage, his 1936 film, is that there's two ways to do this. You have an unexpected explosion, boom, out of the blue, no warning for the audience, 15 seconds of shock versus this idea that Let's say there's a bomb under the table. The audience knows it's about to go off. There's an ordinary conversation taking place. And as these minutes accumulate and the

audience knows exactly when it's going to blow up, and of course, characters do not know, you're creating a much longer path of cinematic sweat coming on, right? And Hitchcock said that's 15 minutes of audience anxiety of the highest order in his view. Do you think, is it true in every case that sustained suspense is really superior to shock?

You know, it's interesting with the way Hitchcock describes suspense and surprise. And in fact, the fact that he talks about it in the context of Sabotage and a lot of these earlier films, he actually uses it really prominently in a lot of these early films to the point where he almost... he almost undermines himself at least a little bit. I mean, I love Sabotage. It's a classic.

I just rewatched it again in preparation for this. And the way he uses the kind of, you know, this concept in Sabotage where we've got this young boy who's been given these canisters of film, but he's also been given a bomb that he doesn't realize is a bomb and he has to deliver it by a certain time.

And then he just kind of goes through his day And Hitchcock milks this for all it's worth to the point where after a certain point it gets ridiculous. I mean, there's like a parade and then at one point the kid gets caught in this sort of public demonstration of this kind of carnival barkers toothpaste demonstration. And then sort of a hair tonic demonstration. It just gets ridiculous and ridiculous.

And so there's a point at which you're thinking to yourself, he's just kind of joking around with us at this point.

The real suspense in that scene, and I don't know, I'm assuming that for audiences in 1936, this was also part of the suspense. But for me today, especially because you don't do things like this in movies, the thing I'm wondering.

Watching is, oh my God, are Is he going to kill the kid? Like, is this kid, is this child going to die? Because that is not a thing that tends to happen in ostensible movies designed for entertainment. And of course, the kid does die. I mean, there's eventually he gets on a bus and there's this huge explosion.

And later on, the responses of the characters to his death is like kind of, it's like sad, but not quite as sad as you might expect. And they're very sort of pragmatic about it. And I'm just thinking, you know, were people's brains just wired differently in 1936?

I didn't mean any harm to come to the boy. Come on. You've got to think of tomorrow. It will be reasonable. What would it have been if you had lost me?

The payoff to the suspense is also really important in that you've got the bomb ticking under the table. But I can't maybe somebody else said this at some point and they said it's actually you've kind of done the suspense wrong, though, if you just have the bomb go off, that the bomb has to somehow be diffused or something like that, because that's how the suspense should really work.

I can't imagine Hitchcock saying that in the Truffaut book, but I feel like somebody at some point said that, that it's not just how you set it up, but also how you resolve it. That's also kind of important.

I think that's in the case of Sabotage. And for people who don't know that film, it's one of Hitchcock's British pictures that he made. He worked in England up until he came to Hollywood and worked for Selznick and made Rebecca. That was his first film over here in the studio system. And Sabotage is a very short film.

It's just about 75, 77 minutes or something like that. And this sequence where the young boy, who's the much younger brother of Sylvia Sidney, who was married to Oscar Homolka, the saboteur, working with an unnamed European country, right, to plant bombs and terrorize London, essentially. And we don't really get details on that because... Hitchcock didn't like to tip his sand or, you know, alienate people with too much in the way of any geopolitics, I think, in my view.

But it's 15 minutes of this boy, as you say, just kind of like, you know, trying to make this delivery of what Homolka, the saboteur, has given him to deliver, right? And he doesn't know it's a bomb. And when that bomb went off, audiences in London, particularly critics, there was a critic who came up to him at the screening, apparently, Hitchcock, and just said.

I remember I was at the press show and a woman critic came up with both raised fists and said, how dare you do a thing like that? Even a hard-boiled critic was taken away with the whole thing.

And that was generally the response, as you say. They were not expecting, and And Hitchcock considered that a grave error. That was his phrase. And it was Truffaut who said, you know, it was sort of close to an abuse of power as a film director, cinematic power. And if you had it to do over again.

I'd never let the bomb go off.

I'd like to ask you this. Does Hitchcock's rule hold up for filmmakers and audiences in 2026?

I think it does. It's advanced in certain ways. I mean, you know, when we talk about suspense versus surprise, or even suspense versus scares, for example. Obviously, you know, because of Hitchcock's quote, we can kind of see these in opposition to one another. But in truth, they work best when they're used together, right? And this isn't a 2026 movie, but when we sort of start thinking about this, the scene that immediately came to my mind was the Silence of the Lambs, the night vision sequence at the end of the film, where Jodie Foster's character has wound up in the lair of the villain, the serial killer. And she goes into a room. She's got her gun out.

She goes into a room, and he switches off the light. The screen is plunged into darkness. And then, of course, we see, from his point of view, the night vision. You know, he can see her. She can't see him. And we see his point of view... watching her and then approaching her and even kind of coming very close to like touching her hair. You could easily do the kind of the lazy version of that scene, which is she goes in there. It's dark. Sound drops out. She's wandering around. Guy comes out of the darkness. Oh, my God. Shock.

You know, and then whatever happens. And it would be a perfectly effective moment. But the night vision sequence is amazing. unforgettable as soon as I saw that. And I mean, this movie is I saw this, I think, senior year of high school. And I was just like, I'm never going to forget this scene for as long as I live.

I mean, you know, and that's kind of how the audience response was. I mean, you could just hear people going like it's Jonathan Demme of all people making you eat out of the palm of his hand. He was not a suspense director at that point. So this was kind of a departure for him. At the time, I remember people were thinking, Jonathan Demme, the guy who did Married to the Mob? You know, he's doing this serial killer movie. And then you walk in and it's Silence of the Lambs. It's just absolutely devastating. But that's kind of what I think about. And that's a scene that's obviously very suspenseful, allows you to feel the suspense by revealing to you something that the protagonist doesn't know or

isn't quite aware of. So it sort of switches perspective in a way, which is something Hitchcock also always did. And as a result, you're just more locked in and more ready to be scared. So it's like a longer scare in a way. Hitchcock's filmography is full of stuff like that. And I think he developed these ideas over the course of subsequent movies to the point where by the time you get to Psycho, it's like everything is working in perfect unison. The suspense is working. He's revealing things.

I mean, he keeps switching perspective in Psycho in a way that just absolutely drives you bonkers with tension. So, you know, so it's, I mean, we're still kind of wrestling with his legacy.

The overuse of the adjective Hitchcockian, especially in the last 30, 40 years of film criticism, as a catch-all for anything that has got anything to do with suspense or somebody trying to kill somebody or any sort of Thriller, horror, anything. It makes me nuts because all you have to do is see any five or seven Hitchcock films to realize that, A, the films are so different from each other. If you look at even the great streaks from, I don't know, you can pick any number of years with him, but, you know, like from 54 to 60, you got Rear Window.

Does that really work like a thriller horror movie? No, not horror, you know, sort of a thriller, a great thriller, because it's sort of a romantic tragicomedy.

Yeah, it's honestly, it's more of a rom-com than it is a horror.

And it's gorgeous and it works. And I was kind of gratified to find out that if you look at the grosses on his movies, and he was a very commercially minded guy. He knew, I mean, all that was in his head as a producer all the time about what it cost to make and how it did. And why it didn't make more and all that. Rear Window was a huge hit, much bigger than Psycho even. I guess if you adjust for inflation and films you might consider more of a kind of a mainstream good time blockbuster of the day, like North by Northwest, Rear Window was the one that just, you know, it's top three or something like that. As is one of my very favorites is Notorious, which is not a thriller really. and not a, this is the Cary Grant's Ingrid Bergman film

from 1946, which is about, yes, it's about sort of a nest of Nazis hiding out in Rio trying to develop a bomb. And they started writing this in 1944 before we unfortunately were living in the atomic age officially. But that's really just another kind of romance clouded with all this really fruitful tension and a larger menace with what's going on in the world. But That's a huge success for him. So that's not Psycho, you know, to your point. Psycho and the Birds are his two distinct outliers, I think, in terms of just, all right, nuts out horror movies, you know, in a way, you know, that work differently than the others. That's my feeling. And those were the two of the first two I ever saw.

So I had a misperception about what Hitchcock really meant, you know, as a filmmaker.

Yeah.

Yeah, Psycho and the Birds in some ways established the vernacular of modern horror. So he has that legacy. But it's so funny because if he'd never made those two movies, he would still be one of the greatest directors of all time. But our idea of Hitchcockian might be a little different. The reason I don't love the term Hitchcockian...

isn't quite because all the films are different because in my mind, I think of Alfred Hitchcock's body just because I've just seen it so many times that it's just like, yeah, it's Hitchcock. The reason I don't like the term Hitchcockian is because like you watch one Hitchcock movie and you're like, oh, he's the best to ever do this. And it's kind of like calling somebody an Einstein. It's like, no, he's not.

He's not an Einstein. Like, you know, he really I mean, just in preparation for this, I rewatched a couple of movies and then I rewatched some sequence and I was like, God damn it. He was so good. You know, he really was. And it still holds up. I mean, Psycho, the scares in Psycho still hold up. I rewatched Rear Window last night and I was just like, the richness of this movie and how every single, there isn't a single off note in the thing. I mean, it is every single shot is perfect. Every single cut is perfect.

And every time you watch it, you notice different things. Like every time, every time Grace Kelly speaks, there's a little car horn in the background, you know, it's just all these little things. I mean, and they're all, I mean, the stories about Hitchcock are legion, obviously also many of them are in the Hitchcock Truffaut book, but I mean, Rope, Rope is obviously kind of a classic example of what we're talking about in terms of suspense. You know, it opens with the two killers murdering a guy and then the rest of it's just a dinner party, you know?

Right, right.

And this is the perfect example of him really kind of doing the suspense thing.

Pity, we couldn't have done it with the curtains open and the bright sunlight.

If we didn't have that opening sequence of seeing this person killed, the rest of the movie would just be like, what the hell are we watching, right?

Right, right.

But because we know that the rest of the film and, you know, every single thing that happens suddenly gains greater meaning. But at the end of that, one of my favorite Hitchcock stories is at the end of that film, we hear a siren coming, a police siren in the distance.

And.

the standard way to do that siren, because it's approaching, the standard way to do it would have been to just record a siren and then bring the level up in the sound mix. And instead, he actually made the police car go all the way away and then recorded it as it was approaching, just to achieve that level of realism. Here comes the.

Squadron up.

And all that's in the middle of a completely artificial construct because it's a one set, you know, meant to look like an extended take stitched together by 10 minute takes, right? It's a great stylistic sort of like discombobulation act, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

Give me one or two of your actual, the suspense sequences in his films that really, that you just sort of keep coming back to as a fan, as a critic, anything.

Well, I mean, one of my all-time favorite Hitchcock sequences, and it's actually one of my favorite Hitchcock films ever, is actually the finale of Young and Innocent, which is another film from this, you know, 1930s British period. I want to say it's 1937. Seven, yeah. And, you know, it's actually kind of very much in the tradition of the 39 Steps and North by Northwest, man falsely accused of murder, trying to find out who really did it.

And at the end of the film, this woman has been killed and our hero is being blamed for it. But we know that the killer had a twitch, right? It's the one thing we know about the killer, a facial twitch. And there's the scene where the heroine and a witness are kind of at this party trying to find this guy. And they have no idea where the killer is because they don't know what the killer looks like.

They just know the twitch.

And this is in a big dance hall.

Yeah, a big dance hall. It's this big, elegant dance hall. And Hitchcock does this, still to my mind, one of the great crane shots in history, where it's this crane sort of swoops over the main hall and then goes through the walls and into this ballroom where people are dancing and there's a band. And it just slowly tracks through the dancers and and towards the band. And of course, the band, they're all in blackface, right?

Yeah, that's a good warning, a warning enough for those who aren't ready for it.

Yeah, and it tracks past the singer, and it tracks towards the drummer. And of course, the drummer has blackface on.

No one can like the drummer, man.

And it tracks and tracks and tracks until it's in an extreme close-up of the drummer. And then, of course, we're still waiting. We know what's about to happen, but we're waiting. It's like, And of course, suddenly he starts to twitch. But it's also great because the song itself is also like a song about a drummer.

Right, right, right, right.

When it comes to doing tricks with a pair of hickory sticks, you know, I'm right here to tell you, sister, no one can like the drummer man. Like, it's just kind of like this song about like how cool drummers are. And everything is just building up to this moment. And there's the suspense thereof because... somewhere along the way, we realize, oh, we're about to find out who the guy is. But then what happens is the rest of the sequence, after that amazing bravura tracking shot, our heroes still can't find the guys. So they're like wondering what's going on and the cops are there. And it's like, it looks like all is lost, but- We see it, they don't. We see it, they don't. But the drummer also sees it.

Like he sees them and he sees them looking for him. And he sees kind of One of the guys pantomiming the Twitch so he knows that they're looking for a guy with a Twitch. And he starts to, like, freak out. Like, he starts to kind of drum wrong, and then he turns around and starts playing the xylophone in a weird way.

And his band leader is going crazy, like, what the hell is wrong with you? And it becomes this weird little comic sequence. And it becomes this whole thing. And eventually there's even like they even take a little break and he's like popping pills because he needs to get rid of the twitch. And, you know, it becomes this whole thing. Suddenly we're in the world of the drummer, the killer, who we don't even know who this guy really is. But suddenly we're in his world and there's this weird kind of suspense of, oh, is he going to be able to kind of get away with it? And, oh, what's going on? What sort of twitch is it?

Just with one eye?

No, both eyes.

Hitchcock was the first director I really fell in love with. And we could talk a whole nother round about the deeply problematic information we now have about Hitchcock's behavior on set with Tippi Hedren. And I mean, I mean, you know, essentially unreported assault, if depending on if you actually choose to disbelieve what Tippi Hedren is claiming about about his behavior on the set of The Birds and also on Marnie, the film that followed, you know, fine, I can't talk you out of it. But You know, he was kind of a demon in many ways.

A pig, if you will.

Yeah. But as a kid, I think because it wasn't just the first director I noticed based on a couple of key early viewings of like films, two of the more blatant films he made, you know, just in terms of the violence and the fright factor, Psycho and the Birds. Then I see a few more. It's just the most conspicuous direction I had ever seen. You know what I mean?

Because it is. I think he's being very disingenuous when he's saying, don't notice the shots. You know, it's not important. Pay no attention to the baby. But the older I get, I appreciate more and more the scenes of suspense in his films. And this is where I think modern filmmakers should really, could really take another look at not just the famous sequences like the, beautiful sequences, like the crop dusting sequence in North by Northwest, which I adore. I think that is a perfect separate seven and a half, eight minute movie in the middle of another movie. I mean, there's a shot in that sequence where Cary Grant's on one side of this dusty Indiana highway and Malcolm Atterbury, the character actor, is playing, you know, he's got like

six lines as the guy, the farmer going to town on the other side of the road. And it's like, there's something about that epic Vista vision of shot of these two men just staring at each other, not talking across the highway, but just before all the trouble starts. That is like, that's just accidental poetry, but it's the most rigorous kind of accident. I love all that. I love those big sequences, but a film like Notorious, which has a lot invested in this relationship between the American intelligence agent played by Cary Grant and this party girl played by Ingrid Bergman, who happens to be the daughter of a convicted Nazi. This is, you know, after World War II, who's then recruited to kind of Mata Hari

her way through this scenario where she has to marry Claude Rains. You know, absolutely the most sort of like weirdly sympathetic man, a former Nazi in Rio, certainly. But that scene in the wine cellar, which is preceded by a kind of a bookend tracking shot to Young and Innocent. where you have this party, you have the telltale key in Ingrid Bergman's hand to the wine cellar door, which she's purloined from her new husband. And the tracking shot starts way up here, down, you don't really know where it's going. It's just like with the drummer in Young and Innocent. And then close up of the hand, very close, and she's fingering the key. And then anyway, that's the setup for the scene. Down in the wine cellar, we,

the audience at one point, see Cary Grant reaching in to kind of see what is up in this wine bottle. We have to find this uranium-235 they're using to enrich their bomb prospects. And he's edging, elbows kind of inching. He doesn't realize he's kind of like edging the bottle with the sand closer and closer and closer to the edge.

And that's like 20 minutes of excellent suspense. And then it has to be dealt with in another way, in another kind of suspense, when they are discovered by Claude Rains down in the cellar. And the only plausible way to get out of this is just, well, we have to make out.

You know, we have to show him that, in fact, you are not faithful and you do love me. And, you know, here we are. And so this is a very fraught, very intimate conversation.

Moment where there's this great, very tight kiss. And that's another kind, I think, romantic suspense, sexual suspense. It's the highest grade of suspense cinema has ever created. That's why the dumbest rom-coms can get by if you're just trying to see when are these two going to actually get together, if you've established at least some interest in that happening in the audience. But I love Notorious for that reason.

I think it's full of moments like that. It's a very simple plot. But there's every kind of suspense in that picture, including a wonderful open-ended ending where you know what the fate is for the Claude Rains character as he goes back up to the mansion that will eventually spell his doom. But we don't need to see that because we've already resolved the plot. But lovely. I think that movie's, to me, that's one of the five now for me that really mean the absolute most. And that kind of suspense I just love, you know. How about a jolt, a Hitchcock jolt movie? that might be out of character for him, if you believe his own axiom.

I was trying to think of like what Hitchcock films have jolts in them. And then to be fair, they do have jolts in them. Sometimes it can be as simple as, you know, in North by Northwest, when the diplomat gets stabbed in the back and he's having this conversation with Cary Grant, something goes, and we think at first that it's a response to this photo that Cary Grant has shown him. But then at Flop's dead and we realize there's a knife in his back. There's always little moments like rear window great moment where, you know, at one point, you know, because they've just been watching Raymond Burr the whole movie. And then suddenly Raymond Burr just like looks straight at them.

That's the best.

And it's that's a shock, you know.

Great moment.

And all these are fed by the suspense that's been built up by that point. But the classic jolts are the ones to me in Psycho. I mean, there's obviously the shower sequence, which is a clinic in so many ways because we've sort of established that there's something off about Norman Bates. But then we see the silhouette of Mother sort of approaching. But then it's just, you know, it is a jump scare when it happens. But then the one, you know, my favorite one in Psycho, which never fails to make an impression on me, is the reveal of Mother at the end. The skull.

Yeah.

I mean, skulls are always scary. We see Vera Miles walking towards Mother, who at this point, we still don't really know what the situation with Mother is, but we know something is off, right? We haven't seen her. We've heard her voice, but sounds a little funky. I mean, we're waiting for the final piece of the puzzle to kind of lock into place. The whole film has built up this moment for us. I mean, we know it's not going to turn around and it's just going to be this nice little lady. We know that's not going to happen. We don't quite know what it is going to be. Especially in 1960 or whenever.

Mrs. Bates.

They weren't ready for it to just be like a skull with a wig on it. And then the reveal happens. She turns around. The skull kind of cranes its neck a little bit because it's turning around in its chair. So it almost seems to be alive a little bit.

And then.

She screams, Jeremiah screams, but then Anthony Perkins comes in dressed with the wig and the knife and everything. He's got this maniacal, you know, smile on his face. And then he's neutralized. But then, like, the lamp starts to move so that suddenly we cut to Mother, the skull, but the eye sockets are moving because of the shadows.

And it's just this sequence that... Every single time I see it, I'm just like, holy crap, this still works. It's just such a great, great, just shocking sequence.

That's great. There's a scene in The Birds, which I think I saw it as a fourth grade sleepover at somebody's house. Saw The Birds and still kind of surprised that they didn't, TV edited versions of The Birds did not changed anything about that scene that is not scored. There's no conventional music in The Birds of any type.

And when Jessica Tandy plays Rod Taylor's mother in The Birds, it's like, where's my neighbor? I gotta go meet the, I forget the character's name, but the farmer who lives in Bodega Bay. And it's just about, it's a minute of her kind of creeping around the house just to see, well, where is he? And she starts to see the damage the birds have done and then finds, you know, Dan, I think his name is, the farmer, You see the feet first, and then you see in a successive pretty sharp, pretty interesting for the time, three successive close-ups still. Dunk, dunk, dunk. Medium, close, close.

Eyes pecked out. An eyeless, bloody eye socket farmer right there. And then she staggers out of the house. And that's it. And the fact that it was quiet and horrific... was brand new to me as a viewer. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Because it wasn't like, but clearly with Psycho and the Birds, Hitchcock was sort of like taking advantage of the new freedoms, as they say in the Coen Brothers movie, you know, the circus man. I mean, it was like, okay, we're going to, we can push this now further than we used to. And he never, he just didn't do movies like that before those two films. And maybe with the exception of Frenzy at the end of the, you know, the second to the last film he did, he never did it again. So it's, I think, proof of his breadth of range. And that's why I think that adjective Hitchcockian is meaningless. Because what is it really referring to?

Except maybe, as you say, just somebody who did it first and did it best, whatever it was, you know, as certainly as a visual stylist. But are there, you know, how have the best of the filmmakers now, if you can think of an example or two, like sort of taken the right lesson from Hitchcock?

I mean, Krager is a great example of this in Weapons, particularly because, I mean, if you look at the way the film is structured, where we're seeing events from different points of view, I mean, he's kind of taking Hitchcock's lessons, right? But sort of turning them into almost a structural conceit.

I mean, Hitchcock will change perspective at the drop of a hat, and he tells his stories in such a way that we don't question it. Because in so much filmmaking, Perspective is so important. Point of view is so important. And there are films that kind of screw things up because they'll be from one point of view. And then suddenly they'll switch point of view for convenience without quite realizing that they've done that. And suddenly you start to feel cheated. One of my pet peeves is when I'm watching a film and information is being kept from me that everybody in the movie clearly knows. Like so that there'll be some kind of reveal or some kind of backstory, trauma, whatever.

And everybody in the movie knows it. It's common knowledge, but the movie keeps not telling me because the director needs to have a reveal at some point. That to me, it can be done well. Like I know over the years I've seen examples of it where I'm like, okay, that kind of worked. But so very often I feel so cheated. I'm like, this feels very artificially kind of, built to basically make me anticipate something, but also just piss me off.

That's audience frustration, not audience suspense. Yeah, exactly.

But Kreger does that really well in terms of shifting perspective so that we learn certain things and then suddenly the perspective changes and then we're now watching something else. We're watching a scene that we had seen before, but suddenly now we're understanding what it was about, you know? And by making that a structural thing, like a structural conceit so that, you know, we have chapters and we have chapter headings and we know kind of what's happening and we know what he's doing. And he's laying bare the artifice in a way, like he's saying, this is what we're doing. Like, this is how I'm telling the story and I'm actually going to draw your attention to it so that you don't feel cheated. So you kind

of start to anticipate things. And that is its own form of suspense because suddenly, OK, we're back to this scene now, but now we're going to see it from the other point of view. And you can Like you start to anticipate things and that's a form of suspense as well. You know, other filmmakers are able to sort of play around with these elements in a way that I think honors the audience's intelligence, doesn't insult our intelligence, doesn't try to make us think they're just going to sort of toy with us because they think we're a bunch of patsies or one bunch of fools. Right. Whereas actually you you showed the audience that you trust them.

that you're going to show them something a little more complicated, but it's going to pay off. Now, obviously, it has to pay off. If it doesn't pay off, then you've lost them forever. I was never a big horror person as a kid. I kind of came to horror later to sort of appreciate it just because so many other people loved it. And I came to enjoy like Wes Craven and some of these auteurs and John Carpenter, obviously.

Sure.

Friday the 13th has just never done anything for me. It just feels like a completely empty exercise.

Yeah. No movie making in it at all. But I think what they have in common, some of the better ones, is that they have a sense of humor, that sort of sadistic sense of humor that Hitchcock was proudly sustaining through a lot of his work, whether it was a straight up thriller or not. And I don't know. I look at something like Get Out, a debut like that.

This is 10 years now almost since Jordan Peele's feature debut. And there are sequences in that that even with a fantastical premise that gets into science fiction and everything else toward the end, the best of that film in the first half, and I love almost all of it anyway, but I keep coming back to the scene with Betty Gabriel as Georgina the maid who's who, as we learn later, is struggling with two psyches, two personalities within one body.

And that scene where Chris thinks the maid has been playing around with his stuff at the house party, and she's cracking, literally cracking open as a psyche in front of you.

Hello.

Hi.

I owe you an apology.

How rude of me to have touched your belongings without asking.

Oh, no, it's cool. I was just confused.

Well, I can assure you there was no funny business. Allow me to explain.

It's such a beautifully written scene that's like a little funny in a horrible way, really terrifying, and completely actor-centered. And that's the kind of payoff that may or may not be really in the Hitchcock realm, because it's actually, you know, if Hitchcock ever truly believe that all actors are cattle or should be treated like cattle or whatever the quip was that he dined out on Dick Cavett over and over. But that's the kind of thing that makes this sort of new generation of thriller horror director seem, I think, like it matters more. It sticks more sort of as the people on the screen driving a story that may or may not be realistic or fantastic. or whatever it is.

Oh, no. No.

No. I'll do something.

To me, that's a little bit of taking the right lessons from Hitchcock, but also adding your own thing, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. And in a way, it is largely kind of built on the savviness of horror viewers. Very often, if I have to review a horror movie, I try, especially, I mean, you know how it works with critics. You know, very often they'll screen these things like the Tuesday before it comes out. And because I have a long commute into New York, it takes me hours to get into New York. Sometimes I'll just skip the press screening very often, especially with horror movies where it's not that important to get the review in time for the embargo or whatever.

I can just run my review on a Friday. I just wait for the Thursday screenings, like the public screenings. And so I like to see them with an audience. And one of the beautiful things about the horror crowd is they show up. They will show up for whatever the new horror movie is. And the theaters know it too.

So before the new horror movie on Thursday at 3 p.m. or whatever, we will get like 10 trailers for other horror movies. And it's this beautiful network. You know, you talk about like a marketing funnel. It's this beautiful network of, I have so many examples now of people who don't know what movies are coming out, even with big movies, like people who just don't know there's an Avatar movie coming out or whatever. And I have always caught these conversations with people who just have no idea what's in theaters and who have no idea what's coming out because they'll find out I'm a film critic and they'll start asking me questions and we have this whole back and forth.

The horror people always know what horror movies are coming out. Like, it's not just a fandom. It's also almost a discipline and a calling.

I heard thy poor daughter found thy flock.

Slain of the great wolf.

The raving wolf spoiled the sin.

I am sent of the king.

Do you think Hitchcock's ideas about suspense versus shock apply at all to this culture right now? I mean, I wonder if he saw a movie like Long Legs, which found a big audience and has its own ideas and effective methods, I think, of like concealing some things and revealing others as we sort of get to see more and more, literally see in a very murky film visually, you know, see more and more of Nicolas Cage. But would, I think this is a generational, you know, I remember talking to a really sharp director right around the time of Seven coming out, Fincher's Seven. And he said to me, I know it works for most of the people I saw that film with. I know it worked for them.

And I can't shake the feeling that this is not my idea of suspense. Sitting in a kind of like a kettle of dread, just waiting for the next body and the next sort of elaboration of this simple idea about the seven deadly sins get to show up. And for that person, for that director, the trade-off was not good enough. Technical facility wasn't good enough. You can't fault Fincher on that level. I do have a question about whether or not Fincher... I don't know. I mean, I know I have atypical ideas about Fincher because like the movie I like is the best is the one that frustrated, you know, his audience the most Zodiac because the whole point is that you cannot solve this thing.

I mean, the Zodiac is a masterpiece.

It's a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece. And it really kind of bums me out that he gave interviews at the time when that came out of like, well, I, I, my goal is that we have made the, the last serial killer movie anybody needs to make because it's a, he was sort of saying it's a hollow genre and we're done with it. And of course the guy went on to make, you know, how many serial killer movies since it's like, you know, no, you're not, you know, you're not done with it. You just want to make one that succeeds, you know, with the public he had made his masterpiece, but tough enough. I'd say Bilge that Zodiac didn't even find its audience in Europe.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it is, I've never quite understood why Zodiac didn't, And this is probably a separate conversation, but I've never quite understood why Zodiac never quite sort of hit.

But it doesn't answer the question. I think maybe that does go back to Hitchcock. It's just like it's a grave error from some angle or another, just like Hitchcock thinks he made the mistake of killing that boy with the package that contains the bomb in the film Sabotage. In the same way, it's like, are you really going to make a film that just is about a kind of a dead end? search for the Zodiac killer that does not end in a satisfying conclusion for the audience or the characters.

I mean, that's the beauty of it, of course. I mean, the thing I say about Zodiac is it's one of the only films I know that gets scarier the more I see it. And I've always wondered why that is. And part of that is, of course, because there's no resolution, right? And by the end of it, you're like, well, he's still out there. Are you sure there's nobody else in the house?

Would you like to go upstairs and check?

No.

Thank you. Thanks for everything.

You're welcome. So, Milga, this summer, with Obsession scoring an enormous hit with a young audience from a young filmmaker, clearly speaking their language, whatever that means to you, a new definition of suspense has sort of cropped up, at least temporarily. that may or may not work for you. And I know you didn't love it. So I'd like to know why you think it's for you, maybe frustrating or lacking.

I mean, I'm probably going to watch Obsession at some point again, just to see if I feel like I missed anything. But I didn't hate Obsession. I enjoyed parts of it. I thought the humor in the film was pretty good. I thought the lead actress was phenomenal. I thought she did a wonderful job. And I know people are saying, oh, she might be nominated for an Oscar and stuff like that, which would be interesting to see.

For me, I thought conceptually the whole thing kind of fell apart a little bit. You know, the sort of very casual wishmaking that then becomes this sort of torment. To me, just narratively, it did not really make a lot of sense. And then sort of the way that a lot of the plot developed I felt like so much more could have been done with the premise. And instead, it basically became a possession movie, you know, a demonic possession.

I felt like I was just watching another variation on an exorcist movie, except it wasn't the demonic possession, which felt very trite to me. So I was a little surprised that people really held it up as this kind of... And not just... I mean, I... I saw it with an audience, with a paying audience, and they clearly loved it.

And obviously it was obviously a huge hit, but also lots of filmmakers have come out of the woodwork to say, oh my God, this is amazing. So, you know, I probably missed something with it. I'll check it out again. For me, there were so many little things that didn't work that it kind of accumulated into, you know, I'm just not with this movie.

Yeah.

Well, okay. Let's loop that back to Hitchcock. Is there something in that film that sort of suggests that Maybe the language of suspense has just changed so much since Hitchcock's various golden eras. They just don't even converse with each other. That maybe young filmmakers don't need to kind of study the work that he did or study his idea of how to build a suspense sequence or his idea of how to lean into a more brazen, aggressive sequence.

type of shock that he did in the two films that we've discussed here, Psycho and the Birds.

Truffaut actually confronts Hitchcock about this idea. And I think it's right around the time of the 30s films that he notes this change. He says, I'm not quoting here, but he says something along the lines of, you switched from sort of narrative plausibility to emotional plausibility. So basically this idea that, I mean, Hitchcock's stories, if you actually sit down and you write them out, they don't really make a lot of sense, right? I mean, North by Northwest to me is a perfect movie. But if I sit down and try to like actually plot out like what happens in North by Northwest, it is idiotic. You know, like this would never happen. And it's absurd. Everything in it is totally absurd. But Hitchcock makes it work, right?

But Hitchcock makes it work through his use of mood, through his use of suspense. He never lets you go so that you don't have the space to start wondering, eh, would that really happen? yeah, would a crop duster accident really be in, like, giant letters on the front page of the newspaper? You know, like, really? That wouldn't happen, you know? I mean, that's a very simple one. But there are all these little things, right? And everything is built on absurdity. But when he's on, when he's working at the height of his game, he grips you so hard.

It's not just that you don't have time to think about these things because you could potentially see. I mean, there are lots of little elements in Hitchcock's films where I'm like, ah, that would never happen as I'm watching. But you're having too much fun. You're having too much fun to really question it.

It's the same filmmaker that, again, as I revisit some of these films, just to kind of get a sense of what kind of situation maker, and that the three words that always apply to him will follow him around forever is master of suspense, right? The thing that makes it stick now for me, the older I get, is moments like James Stewart in Rear Window. I remember seeing that for the first time on the big screen where He can't do anything about what is about to happen to Grace Kelly across the courtyard. And again, that's another scene that is played, Stewart is playing it for peak emotional anguish. And I hadn't, at that time, when I first saw that film in my early 20s, I hadn't seen James Stewart do that kind of acting. I just

hadn't found the films yet. And that was the film.

What's she trying to do?

Why didn't she turn him in?

She's a smart girl.

Smart girl, she'll get herself arrested.

It'll get her out of there, won't it? Look, the wedding ring.

Turn out the light, he's seen it.

And it was like suddenly those situations matter in ways that are, they don't even really feel like fun anymore, you know, because they feel in the best way painfully human and kind of awful and relatable enough within the structure, this sort of construct of the plot that is designed to give you just a series of suspense sequences, jolts, laughs a little romantic escapism uh you know whatever it is but hitchcock one of those accidentally serious film artists i think would never own up to the seriousness but i hope that filmmakers today who make anything that some idiot is going to call hitchcockian because they don't know the work enough well you know can realize that there's something just about the human investment in the character and

taking the time to make the plot even if it's stupid And, you know, just sort of hanging together just enough to take your mind off it, as you say. Well, Bilge, it's been a gas talking these themes with you, suspense versus surprise. I like both. I like suspense and surprise. I like the occasional shock. I guess I just don't like too much of any one set of jump scares in my movie. And if I hear that particular sound and sound effects cue, you know, some metallic shrieky sound, then I think, you know, we just have to go back to some sort of drawing board and figure out a new way to startle people.

Yeah, jump scares are easy to overuse.

I thought about what Bilge mentioned as one of his favorite moments in all of Hitchcock, that moment in Rear Window when Raymond Burr who's across the Greenwich Village Courtyard apartment from James Stewart, confronts Stewart for the first time simply by looking straight at him as he's looking through his camera lens. It's a beautiful jolt right in the middle of a really beautifully sustained suspense sequence. Grace Kelly's over there in the apartment across the way, about to be killed by this man, and she's saved by the police arriving just in the nick of time. But The murderer knows that this snooping neighbor now has his number.

She looks across the courtyard at the Stewart character. The killer, Raymond Burr, does likewise, and he stares directly into the photographer's camera lens, which is also Hitchcock's camera lens. No film has ever been more about the implications of watching surreptitiously than Rear Window, and that moment of being found out, it's one of the greatest moments reactions I've ever heard, and I've heard it more than once in screenings of Rear Window. You hear a collective intake of breath, a collective laugh, and a shudder in any movie audience. And that shock inside a suspense sequence? Well, it's just about perfect.

So is suspense better than shock, or just one half of the recipe for a scene that has everything an audience could want? The Movie Racket is produced by Joe Disseau and me, I'm Michael Phillips. Adam Kempinar and Sam VanHalgren, executive producers. I'd love to hear from you about your favorite suspense and thrill-seeking films, Hitchcock's or otherwise. Drop me your wisdom at MovieRacket at Filmspotting.net. Thanks to our extraordinarily special guest, Bilga Abiri, whose writing on all sorts of cinema can be found at Vulture.com, part of the New York Magazine website. It's mostly behind a paywall, and it's entirely worth your money to read what he has to say.

I'm Michael Phillips, and this is a FilmSpotting production.

"There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise" with Bilge Ebiri | The Movie Racket

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