What Makes a Thriller Work Without On-Screen Gore and Crafting Suspense Through Restraint

When people think of suspense, the first thing that comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock. In a time when gore and hard-core violence wasn’t allowed on screen, Hitchcock still managed to ignite adrenaline rushing fear into his audience.

(What Writing Mysteries Taught Me About Fiction Writing.)

But how exactly did he do this? The answer is a lot simpler than you think. With information.

Showing the audience the impending danger that the character doesn’t know about, leaves the viewer on the edge of their seat waiting to see what will happen.

An example of this, one that I learned in a Writer’s Digest conference no less, is imagine having a group of people sitting at a table. If you put a bomb in the middle of the table, everyone will scatter and run away. This is merely shock. But, if you put it under the table unbeknownst to the people in the room, then you have suspense. The audience doesn’t know when the bomb is going to go off. Maybe the real bad guy the bomb is intended for gets up to go to the bathroom. Will they be spared? What if someone’s child walks into the room, will they be a casualty?

Agatha Christie is another example of how you can write a very suspenseful book without resorting to gore. In her novel, And Then There Were None, Christie focuses on the psychological elements. She builds masterful suspense as a group of people who arrive on the island anxiously await their host, only to find themselves getting picked off one by one. There isn’t a need to describe a gruesome scene when you are writing from the next potential victim’s perspective. For them it isn’t nearly as important. All they know is they might be next, and they want to figure out how they can stop it.

For my novel, The Tutor, one of the ways in which I create suspense throughout the book is through revelations and intentions. My story follows a character Isabel who very purposely edges her way into this particular family by becoming the son’s tutor. During that time, the reader has no idea why she has become obsessed with this family or what her intentions are. They can only assume it is to harm them in some way, leaving the readers to wonder why she wants to hurt them and how does she intend to do it, allowing them to fill in the gaps with maybe their own fears.

The boy’s mother, Rose, is a widow who meets Grant Caldwell, a very wealthy man who unlike her former husband, is attentive and caring to her. He offers her a life she never could’ve dreamed of before not only for herself, but for her son James, whose elevated education will open doors he never would have thought to go through before.

But Rose has a dark secret from her past. One she has kept buried for years. No one could possibly know about it, because the others are dead. But when she’s forced to move in with her ailing mother-in-law, Evelyn, she realizes that her secret has been found out. But rather than come out with it, through manipulation and veiled threats we have a cat and mouse game between the two. A bomb that Evelyn is threatening to detonate, but the readers don’t know when it will go off.

By switching points of view between Isabel, Rose, and Evelyn, we can create hooks that leave the reader in suspense to what will happen next with that character. This keeps the reader turning the page, waiting to get back to that person, only to discover yet another hook with someone else and ultimately tearing through the pages eager to know what will happen next.

Through each character’s psyche we see snippets of a past that the reader will ultimately piece together and understand their true meaning. But by leaving breadcrumbs throughout the novel, especially at the end of a chapter, they are left in suspense, wanting more. It leads them to draw up their own conclusions by putting themselves in that position, wondering what they might do if they were them.

Ultimately, one of the reasons to write a thriller without graphic violence is so it appeals to a wider audience. I have children and enjoy putting on Hitchcock movies, because when I want to watch something in the other room, I know that I won’t have to sit there with the remote in hand ready to lower the volume when someone curses or skip over graphic violence or sex scenes should my kid walk in. All Hitchcock does is tell the story. If someone is shot, they grab their chest and fall down. It gets the point across, and they move on.

In the famous scene in Psycho, all you see is someone holding a knife, the knife coming down, a scream and a dark color liquid going down the drain. Nothing gruesome, nothing dramatic, but tell me that didn’t strike fear into you every time you were in a hotel shower.

The same can be done with writing. You obviously would have to describe how a person died, but you can keep it right to the point. You can lose your readers in the details. It’s always important to set the scene, but you don’t want your reader to be unable to see the forest through the trees.

Instead, focus on the reactions of others in that scene. If it’s the killer’s perspective, expand more on their satisfaction, and what this death means to them. If they are a witness to the murder, what’s running through their mind right now? It can be the fear that they might be next and need to escape, or instead what the loss of this person means to them.

For someone who just happens stumble upon the murder, they will be asking themselves who did this and why did this happen. If it was an accident or someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the biggest question of all, will there be more? And that is exactly what the intention should be in a suspenseful thriller, to keep the reader wanting more.

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