Hey Writer Person

Hey Writer Person ✍️ Building Tension

So a friend asked a great question - how do you slowly build tension, particularly for horror.

First, and most important - pick up books you found really tense, and re-read them. Pay attention to how the author builds the tension. It's really the best way to figure out how to make tension work for you.

To me, building tension is all about setting up expectations -- the expectation of the threat, the expectation of how your character will handle that threat, the expectation around how relationships will be effected by the threat. Expectation expectation expectation. I personally think that when the audience is expecting something, they wait for it, anxiously. But you need to take the time to tell them what to wait for. 

Let's break down one of my all time fave movies for this one - Jurassic Park. Buckle up.

First scene, raptor eats a guy - threat established - but they contain her, it's all under control (we now EXPECT the raptor will get out eventually). Next, we meet Dr. Grant. He hates kids. Character established. More talk about raptors. We're learning they're like...the scariest dinosaur. We expect to encounter them at some point, and we know it will be bad. We go to the island, see the raptors in their special cage and meet the gamekeeper who lets us know how smart they are. So now we know, raptors are like....super SUPER scary. We expect an encounter with escaped raptors to be a disaster. Oh look, dr. Grant has to go into the park with kids! We know he hates kids. We expect that won't be comfortable for him. All of this takes a long time to establish, but it's vital to giving the audience the information it needs to be able to predict (or think they can predict) how the characters will fare when the threat breaks down that door.

What you do with those expectations is part of the fun and totally up to you. But I think it's important to take the time to set those expectations up -- what is the threat? How does it work ('the other two raptors, you didn't even know we're there...")? Who is your character? How will they likely handle the threat when they face it?