“At one end of the spectrum, there’s the jump scare,
and at the other end, there's slow-building, unnerving anticipation—the terror.
For my money, terror is the best type of scare, because it’s the promise of
horror to come. When the audience is in that state, you don’t have to do much.
Their imagination is more powerful than any piece of imagery or any timing or
misdirection you could do.”— African-American screenwriter-director Jordan
Peele (
Get Out, Us), quoted in Jonah Weiner, “The New Master of Suspense,” WSJ. Magazine, March 2019 (registration required for
viewing)
(The image accompanying this post comes from Peele’s Get
Out, with perhaps the most famous scene from that 2017 thriller: Daniel Kaluuya’s
Chris as he descends into the “Sunken Place.” During these weeks leading up to
Halloween, it’s well worth seeing how this Oscar-winning screenplay—with nods
towards The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s
Baby—anticipated America’s unfolding real-life racial nightmare.)
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