Fear, Hope, and Not Knowing: The Recipe Suspense Runs On
Cognitive psychologists Ortony, Clore, and Collins describe suspense as a compound of three ingredients: fear, hope, and uncertainty. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays out their account, fear is displeasure about the prospect of an undesirable event, hope is pleasure about the prospect of a desirable one, and suspense shows up when both are running and the outcome is genuinely unsettled. People feel suspense, on this view, when they fear a bad outcome, hope for a good one, and do not know which will arrive. Think of that as a working definition for a tense scene, not just a mood word for a tense viewer. The encyclopedia's analogy is everyday rather than cinematic: walking at night through an unfamiliar neighborhood you have heard is dangerous, fearing a mugging, hoping to arrive safe, uncertain which way it goes. What makes the account useful is that they treat fear and hope as prospect emotions — feelings aimed at an outcome that has not been decided yet. Their intensity is not arbitrary. It tracks two variables: how desirable or undesirable the outcome would be, and how likely it is. Fear, in their telling, grows as the danger worsens, the outcome gets worse, or the odds of it happening rise.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The sting of the account is that fear here is aimed at something that may never happen. The emotion is doing its work on a merely possible event, which is why it can be manufactured before anything goes wrong.
It also makes tension a dial rather than a mood. Raise the danger or the odds of the bad outcome and the fear is supposed to rise with them, which is a claim you can test by rewriting the same scene with worse stakes.
Fine, but on this account dread alone is not suspense. You also need hope in the mix — something the viewer wants to happen — or you have atmosphere rather than a scene that pulls.