The Elements of Suspense

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The Elements of Suspense
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All Stories Contain Certain Elements

• Plot
• Character
• Setting

• Dialogue
• Narrative

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Suspense

• Anxiety or apprehension resulting from an
  uncertain, undecided, or mysterious situation
• Dictionary.com

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• In suspense there must be an unknown a
  suspicion, a mystery, a danger we expect

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Suspense (mystery, intrigue, tension) is built
with

• Facts
• Innuendo
• Atmosphere
• Action

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Ways to deepen suspense

• Dreams
• foreshadowing what may happen
• showing the charactersdeepest fears, his
  haunting past

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Ways to deepen suspense

• Clues
• journals / diaries / letters / notes / pictures,
  etc.
• physical evidence that can be used to determine
  time of death, how, and where

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Ways to deepen suspense

• The Weather
• the season can match or contrast the characters
  emotional state

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Ways to deepen suspense

• The Senses
• the smell of blood, the stench of an alley
• the taste of fear
• reaction to finding a dead body
• the feel of blood-soaked clothing

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Ways to deepen suspense

• The Villain
• his/her motivations or intentions
• simple greed, jealousy, money
• the complicated serial killer mind

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Ways to deepen suspense

• Other characters
• plant red herrings
• shift suspicion onto them

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Themes Concerning People

• Terror inflicted upon the often unknowing and
  innocent victim
• Innocent people caught up in events they cannot
  control
• Transference of guilt innocent characters
  failings are transferred to another character and
  magnified
• Explored the compatibility of men and women
  (especially a mother figure)
• The wrong man

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Themes Concerning the Mind

• Guilt (real or the appearance of it)
• Redemption
• Early films reflected the political climate of
  Europe during the war
• Preferred to use suspense rather than surprise

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The Nightmarish Mind of Edgar Allen Poe
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Background

• Born 1809-1849
• His mother died during his youth and his father
  abandoned them
• After the death of his grandmother, he married
  his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia in 1835
• Virginia died in 1847
• Died in 1849

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Education of Poe

• Entered and dropped from both the University of
  Virginia and West Point
• Ran into debt and started borrowing money,
  gambling and getting deeper into debt

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Writing Style of Poe

• Wrote in a Gothic Style
• Deep and intense
• Explorations of ? world of dream and of nightmare
• In his stories the past is darker, more ominous
  and oppresses his heroes and heroines

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Poes Characters

• Many of his characters are filled with madness
• Obsessed with the irrational side of the mind

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Edgar Allen Poes
The Tell-Tale
H E A R T
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General Information

• Setting
• The story opens with the narrator telling readers
  that he is not mad. His narrative is supposed to
  be a vehicle to show he is not insane.
• The story is set in a house occupied by the
  narrator and an old man during the mid 1800s.

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General Information

• Genre
• Horror story and
• psychological thriller
• Story and Style
• The Tell Tale Heart is one of Poes shortest
  stories. Its lack of detail only adds to its
  suspense by creating a mood of paranoia for the
  reader that mirrors the feelings of the narrator

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Literary Focus

• Point of View
• The story is told in first-person point of view
  by an unreliable narrator.
• The narrator is obviously deranged, even though
  he declares at the outset that he is sane.
• As in many of his other short stories, Poe does
  not name the narrator.

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Literary Focus

• Irony
• The irony of the story stems from the narrators
  claims of sanity being disproved by his own
  claims.
• Although he proclaims himself to be too calm to
  be a madman, he is defeated by a noise that may
  be interpreted as the beating of his own heart

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Literary Focus

• Imagery and Repetition
• Poes use of sound throughout the narrative,
  combined by using repetition adds to the storys
  suspense.
• The effect is a building of noise in the readers
  ears and a building of tension

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Themes

• Mankinds wicked sideanother self
• Mankinds paranoia
• Mankinds Fear
• Mental Pressure and Fatigue
• Appearance vs. Reality
• Dark Appearances vs. Dark Thoughts

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Character Analysis

• The Narrator
• Deranged unnamed person who tries to convince the
  reader that he is sane.
• He is intelligent and has the ability to commit a
  crime with skill and precision
• He nagged by what he calls heightened senses,
  something that is a condition found in several
  various Poe stories 

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Character Analysis

• Character Analysis
• The Old Man
• Neighbor
• Three Policemen

Seemingly harmless elder who has a hideous "evil
eye" that unnerves the narrator.  Person who
hears a shriek coming from the house of the
narrator and the old man, then reports it to the
police.  Officers who search the narrator's
house after a neighbor reports hearing a shriek.
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