What do you dread? How does dread build inside you as you’re
thinking about it? It’s that sinking feeling in your stomach, the rising of
your heart rate, the way your thoughts begin to fire too rapidly as everything
else slows down around you. Dread in horror is a key feature to terrifying an
audience—be it reader, viewer, or player. Dread is built in various ways for
different mediums: movies may use visual clues of repetition, video games might
use escalating sound effects, and books often use deliberate pacing through
paragraph breaks.
In scary stories, from our childhoods, dread is often built
through repetition that we know will eventually bring something bad: the
sayings in variants of the Mr. Fox/ Bluebeard stories of “Be Bold,” then “Be
Bold, Be Bold,” before “Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold, Lest Your Hearts
Blood Run Cold.” It’s the campfire buildup of someone knock, knocking on a
door, before shouting the last phrase so that everyone jumps. We find dread in
patterns, because fairy tales have taught us to pay attention to patterns. In The Ring, for example, we know there’s a
pattern set in place from the very beginning: watch the video, get the phone
call telling you “Seven days,” have increasingly creepy events happen to you
going through the next week, and then your TVs pop on and a creepy, demon girl
comes to collect you. Not fun. The movie starts by showing us the end of this
pattern for one unlucky victim, so that we’re already prepared for what’s to
come—we know the pattern and so we can dread it. The film then highlights the
patter, not only by counting down the days, but also with visual cues (screens—Tv
or computer monitors-- are in a lot of scenes, visual elements from the video
appear throughout the film, etc). This slow delay of the pattern, with end
results we know are going to be horrific, is one way that films can successfully
build a feeling of dread.
Another way is the slow build-up of creepiness through use
of tiny visual and audio elements. I remember first watching The Orphanage and becoming so
dread-filled that when there’s a banging sound near the end of the film, I
probably jumped about three feet in the air. The film uses some, rare,
jumpscares, but more effective in creating such dread-filled tension are its
uses of small creepy elements—sounds that are just a little off, things
flickering in the corners of our eyes.
The slow build-up to dread is almost even more effective in
literature, where we have our minds as readers filling in the horrible blanks
for us. I recently wrote, at Ploughshares, about the uses of dread in two
stories, “The Night Piece” by Andre Alexis and “Sacken” by China Mieville. What
I talked about was how each of those pieces used deliberate paragraph break
pacing in order to sustain and build dread. In “Sacken,” Mieville makes use of
several one to two short sentence paragraphs to force the reader into a pattern
of reading that increases the tension leading up to the reveal (paragraph
breaks are denoted here by slashes): ““Something was on the floor./ A
darkness. A gross misshape. / Something huge and wrong and wet. / It blocked
her way./ Mel’s throat closed. The new thing in the room dripped.”
In videogames dread is often built through ambience and
sound. In Silent Hill 2 (WHICH WAS A MASTERPIECE), the main character walks
through a fog cloaked town. A sign that nasty things are coming through the fog
is the use of a radio whose static increases as things approach. When the sight
line is diminished, the increasing static tells the player to prepare. Every
blip of static, after the first time this effect is deployed, sends the player
into a dread-filled panic. This panic often decreases the players chance of
survival because we aren’t thinking as clearly which then reinforces the dread
of the static.
Dread, ultimately is one of
the best ways to build horror. It’s the difference between a jump scare
which has an immediate tension and release and the feeling of horror that
clings to you long after the film itself is over. Slasher movies tend to fall
into jump scares, while dread is something more akin to a movie like The Ring
(which bothered me for days afterwards). Dread when done right builds to an
impossible tension level. I think of it as the typical plot chart of rising
action, except it’s the rising dread that makes the viewer so unnerved that
every moment become a terrifying expectation. Movies that utilize dread are
often one’s talking about more universal conditions: The Orphanage’s horror is
loss and the traumas of childhood, The Ring warns us against what we’re willing
to do in the face of horror. I’ll return to my opening question: what do
you dread? And how well has that feeling been conveyed through artistic
mediums?
