Suspense, or tension, I guess, is the word commonly used to describe that inertial period in horror focused not on something happening, but on the potential that something is going to happen. However, tension, or suspense or what have you, is tied to the notion that what you are being caused by the filmmaker to expect to happen may or may not do so–that’s the stuff of thrillers, not horror. No, there’s something far more… delicious about knowing, without being verbally told, that what you dread happening is about to happen, inexorably, inevitably. It’s this prolonged frisson of certainty that helps make good horror so satisfyingly horrifying.
I think this is why a film like The Shining actually gets scarier upon repeated viewing. The first time you see Danny turn the corner on his Big Wheels, there’s that scary Big Reveal of the little girls–terrifying, no doubt, for all the reasons detailed here. But in each subsequent viewing, you know what’s coming; since there’s more to the horror-image in question than mere jump-out-atcha shock tactics, this foreknowledge (foreboding?) actually enhances the horror, instead of detracting from it.
That same factor is at work, I believe, in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. I watched it last weekend and was struck once again by how masterfully Shyamalan creates an almost instantaneous foreknowledge of horror, making those tense build-ups (when Merrill watches the newscast from Rio, for example, or when Graham’s flashlight goes out in the cornfield) unbearable, almost sensually so. Again, it’s not just the fear of being startled by something jumping out at you–that’s certainly part of it, but in addition to that primal (infantile) fear of the short sharp shock there’s the awful certainty that something bad–something wrong–is going to show up. Indeed, Shyamalan himself capitalizes on the horror-increasing potential of certainty–in the newscast scene he actually has the videotaped footage of the alien’s appearance digetically rewound and re-shown. The man clearly understands the horrifying power of repeat viewing!
To ramble a bit, I think that similar forces are at play in those forms of popular music that capitalize on near-mathematically induced emotional-crescendo-through-repetition: electronic dance music (the keyboard-hating youngster in me always wants to refer to it with the catch-all term “techno,” but that refers to a specific subset, so no can do), funk, and prog- or math-rock.
When I first got into funk (thanks to a four-stage assault on my ass by Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns’ “A Blow for Me, a Toot to You,” the JBs’ “Doin’ It to Death,” (and especially) Herbie Hancock & the Headhunters’ “Watermelon Man” and a live recording of Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s “Very Yes”), I was struck by how the repetition and predictability of the grooves, far from negating their impact as would be the case with predictable Top 40 pap-pop, actually enhanced or indeed embodied the songs’ appeal. Those moments of THE BOMB–when a groove that has been slowly building to the horn-laden cathartic explosion you knew was coming fiiiiinally gets there–are made so powerful, so funky, by their very inevitability.
I quickly realized that this same principle applied to my favorite electronic acts: Orbital (during the suite on the eponymous record known as the Brown Album) and especially Underworld (during, well, pretty much everything, but “Born Slippy.NUXX,” “Cowgirl,” “Pearls Girl” and “Moaner” deserve special attention–as does their improvisatory and triumphant live album Everything Everything, a recording based in no small part on playing off listener recognition that their favorite part of their favorite song is slowly being woven into the sonic tapestry…closer…closer…yeah!).
Moving over to the math-rock set, they tend to put the “awful” back into the “certainty” equation. Witness the ever-mounting one-note menace of King Crimson’s “Starless,” the timid-yet-insistent plucking atop the bass juggernaut in Tool’s cover of Peach’s “You Lied,” or the crescendoing synthesized chorus of the damned in Nine Inch Nails’ wordless “Just Like You Imagined.”
Call it the Collins Certainty Principle if you will. Used by funk & electronic dance acts, it yields an almost erotic dose of musical bliss. Used by dark prog bands and horror films, it yields an equally sensual payload of purest terror. Either way, prolonged frisson from certainty.