My brother, who's a mechanic, said 'the problem is never the noise, it's the quiet before it' and it totally flipped how I think about writing tension.

3 comments

3 Comments

That "quiet before it" thing hits hard. I mean, the best horror movies are the scenes where nothing is happening but you're just waiting for it. It's all about that held breath feeling.

king.derek2mo ago

It's the quiet after the noise, actually.

wyatt_thomas2mo ago

Derek's got it backwards though. The quiet after the noise is just relief, you know? The scary part is the quiet before something happens, when your brain is filling in all the worst possibilities. That's the tension the original post was talking about. After the jump scare, the quiet just means you get to breathe again.