Tension lessons from a great book and a middling movie

It’s WHALEFALL versus HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME and the whale wins

You can think of this piece as me in conversation with Andromeda, who last week wrote a piece hunting for the elusive rules to writing suspense. Today, I try my hand at rules for holding tension, specifically.

In addition to reading Andromeda’s piece last week, I finished Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel Whalefall, which I absolutely loved. Then a couple nights ago, I watched the 1981 slasher Happy Birthday To Me with my horror-enthusiast friend Erin Lee.¹ I enjoyed the movie enough for a slasher, but on my drive home, I started thinking about all the things the film did wrong, and then I realized it was a lot of the things Kraus did right.²

Yes I made this on canva how could u tell

Before we start the match, let’s compare our fighters. Depending on the website, they’re both billed as horrors and thrillers, with their primary genre difference being that Happy Birthday To Me is also called a mystery and Whalefall is also called sci-fi. (And I agree with the three genre labels for each.)

Whalefall is about a teenage diver named Jay whose estranged father committed suicide at sea. While Jay is diving for his father’s remains, seeking to repair his familial relationships and his own reputation as a diver, he is swallowed by a sperm whale. (Gulp!) (Haha!)

Happy Birthday To Me is an 80s slasher where a group of prep school seniors are dying (in very creative ways) in the days leading up to main character Ginny’s 18th birthday. Ginny suffers from memory loss and blackouts (uh oh) due to an experimental brain surgery she received after her mother’s mysterious death.

On the two-sentence description, each is a serious contender for being entertaining, stressful (in a fun way), and emotionally interesting to boot. But only Whalefall blew it out of the water.

Image courtesy of WhaleSense.org because I have no sperm whale blow hole pics to call my own

And one of the big reasons was tension. Whalefall was TIGHT. Happy Birthday To Me was not. There were some pretty finite differences in how the two thrillers handled tension, and I think we can learn from each.

Short, meaningful scenes

We were almost an hour and a half into Happy Birthday To Me when Erin groaned and said “we still have thirty-six minutes left?!” (Going briefly back to structure, the spot where the story crosses from third to fourth quarter is NOT where your audience should be checking to see how much longer this is going to take.)

As soon as we realized how much movie we had left, we immediately started talking about how slow the scenes were. Everything was taking too long—too many long shots of scenery and people walking from one place to another. Too many scenes spent on who was dating whom, which had nothing to do with why these kids were dropping like flies.

Making the audience wait for something is not, in and of itself, suspenseful. Better to move along quickly to the parts that deserve lingering, like Kraus did. His chapters were short and snappy. No wasted space—every flashback had obvious purpose, usually pulling double duty in showing Jay’s relationship with his father and educating Jay, and the reader, about something happening in the real time of the story.

But Kraus still lingered when he wanted to: the moment when Jay encounters the whale and is swallowed spans multiple chapters, separated by important flashbacks, even though it would have taken mere seconds in real time.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to say that every suspense story (or even every thriller specifically) needs to be made up of short scenes. But lemme tell you, it didn’t hurt in Whalefall. It made me feel like I was flying through that book.³ And I did fly through it; it’s easy to say “just one more chapter” when you can see that it’s a thin one.

When you’re reading short chapters, you can feel the story gaining momentum. Another thing that builds momentum is connection.

Connection between scenes

For all our complaints about how much the movie would have benefitted from being trimmed down, Happy Birthday To Me could have used more connection between the scenes. Several times one of us said something like “where are we now?” or “I guess that part’s over?”

One of so many things I loved about Whalefall was how Kraus connected the scenes, which made it feel like I was being pulled along in a current. Not heavyhanded, there was usually something pretty clearly stated that hinted where the story was going next: a question Jay was trying to answer about the stomach of a sperm whale led into a chapter where, in the past, he had learned the answer to his question. (There were points where the book reminded me, pleasantly, of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.)

To me, the connection piece is really important. This might be oversimple, but when I think of tension, I think of a rope being held taut. I want the whole story to be one rope, held taut and getting tighter by the minute. Not a series of ropes, some taut, some floppy. (I don’t need this kind of continuity in every story, but I think it’s good in something that’s aiming to be a thrill ride.)

Bad choices versus stupid choices

Believe it or not, Jay does not make perfect decisions when he finds himself inside the whale. But his bad choices make sense: he knows way more about the body of a sperm whale than the average reader does and I didn’t fault him for occasionally bringing himself new problems by making proactive but poor choices. Understandable bad choices don’t take me out of the reading experience.

Meanwhile, Ginny and her friends make some boneheaded decisions, the likes of which you’ve seen in many a slasher. Acting nonchalant as your friends go missing one by one. Acting even less chalant when someone walks into your place wearing a full stealth suit and black gloves. Stopping to pant and paw at your face two feet away from where you’ve just escaped the killer, who is perfectly capable of also walking those two feet. When you act like that in a movie, I want to watch you die. (Which, in fairness, is its own part of the entertainment in a slasher. But the most tense, entertaining kill in Happy Birthday To Me was the guy who wasn’t being stupid; he just didn’t see it coming like the viewer could. More on him below.)

Mounting problems versus endless misdirects

Happy Birthday To Me had waaaay too many misdirects. I cannot tell you how many characters acted like the killer at one point or another. Too many to keep track during viewing. Eventually, it got annoying. And it felt lazy; it wasn’t like everyone had a motive. Only one person ever had a motive. Everyone else was just acting creepy AF at one point or another, for no earthly reason besides giving the viewer thirty seconds of “wait, maybe he’s the killer?”

I will retract this the next time I want to use a misdirect, but, I think too many misdirects signify insecurity in the author or weakness in the suspense. Kraus knew the actual story that was unfolding was interesting so he didn’t need to try to keep the reader guessing that maybe Jay was actually in a submarine or an enormous dolphin or a coma or something. He was confident about it. He was like “this guy got swallowed by a whale; now watch him try to get out.”

Instead of misdirects, Kraus used mounting problems to keep the tension rope pulled tight. As noted above, some of the problems were caused by Jay himself, but others originated outside of Jay. (An early example is another animal the whale swallows…DOUBLE GULP!)

The most suspenseful parts of the slasher, in my enthusiastic viewer’s opinion, were the scenes after the slasher’s identity had been revealed. (But see my last section, because it turned out there was one last twist coming.)

If you are a fan of middling slashers and don’t want this one ruined for you, go now, because I’m about to tell you what you probably guessed from the two-sentence description: yep, Ginny is the killer. And it’s so much better once they’re showing her doing it. The scenes are undeniably more tense, in part because the filming is no longer trying to hold back her identity. As I indicated above, the best death scene is the one where the guy didn’t do anything dumb; he just accepted his pretty friend’s invitation to go back to her place after the dance. She isn’t dressed like a cat burgler or wearing murder gloves. She’s cute and nonthreatening and he’s opening his mouth for the shish kebab she’s feeding him and you’re squirming because you know what’s gonna happen and he doesn’t. (Dramatic irony!) Same for when her friend shows up the next day to set up the birthday party. Same for when her therapist makes a house call because she called saying she thinks she killed someone but doesn’t remember doing it. Same for when her dad gets home, just in time for the big party. The best scenes were when they stopped hiding the ball.

Tension-raising novelties are good if the rest is good too

Both Whalefall and Happy Birthday To Me had some gimmicks that definitely heightened the tension. For the slasher, it was creative deaths and a creepy tableau in the final scene.⁴ For the novel, it was the high concept plot (guy gets swallowed by whale) and the way Kraus opened every present-tense chapter with how much oxygen was left in Jay’s tank. Both stories had really fun novelties working for them, but Happy Birthday To Me is probably only notable for its novelties, whereas Whalefall was thoroughly exceptional.

Emotional depth

Here’s where I call back Andromeda’s piece and say yes, character first, even when you’re working in a genre that seems to be all about plot.

Even with a high concept idea like guy-gets-swallowed-by-whale, so much of what happens inside the whale has to do with who the guy is—the decisions he makes, the knowledge he has, the gear he has (and doesn’t), the emotional baggage he carries. I don’t know if Daniel Kraus would agree, but I say: even if you’re going to write about a whale-swallowing, start by thinking about the guy getting swallowed. Kraus clearly did a ton of character work on Jay and his father, and it showed.

Happy Birthday To Me was never going to go as deep as Whalefall got, but the whole movie was moving toward a solid enough ending with an interesting emotional reason for all the slashing that had happened. Ginny’s mother died in a drunk driving accident after all the rich kids at school stood Ginny up for her 14th birthday party…all the same seniors who were getting killed four years later. Ginny’s absentee dad gets home and goes out to the cottage on the property and finds all the bodies arranged around the birthday table (wearing party hats!!). Ginny comes out carrying a cake and singing happy birthday to herself. Then she cuts the cake and stabs daddio. Honestly, not a bad ending for an 80s slasher.

But then, the movie ran five minutes longer, and somebody slapped a twist on it. And I mean slapped. They threw that twist on while the movie was headed out the door. There was almost no groundwork laid. The reason the slasher was slashing was so stupid. We actually had to pause the movie to figure out what was going on. All the emotional steam went out of it.

Are you ready? Ginny has stabbed her dad. Camera starts to pan. One of the bodies at the table sits up. It’s Ginny. Then the Ginny holding the knife peels off her face. (I am not kidding.) It’s one of her friends! Who explains, in a good ole fashioned murderer’s monologue,⁵ that she killed everyone, as Ginny, so they would think it was Ginny doing it! Whilst dosing Ginny with chloroform each time so she’d black out during the killing! And then she rearranged Ginny’s own birthday party scene! Wow, must have been for a very deep psychological reason. It’s because Ginny’s dead mom had an affair with this girl’s dad and Ginny is her half sister and it had absolutely no impact on her life! I don’t think I’ve ever read or watched a worse ending than that one.

I looked the movie up after the fact, and according to the trivia section on IMDb, the original script was the better ending, up to those last five minutes. Apparently, under pressure for a twist, the producers filmed the whole movie while still trying to figure out something to add at the end. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s very believable having watched it.

See, here we’ve connected it back to Andromeda’s piece again, with Lisa Jewell’s advice: don’t build your whole story around a twist. Now I’ll add: and don’t ruin it for one either.

Caption contest on this pic in the comments, please. I’ve had a long week.

1. At some point I’d like to write a piece on Erin’s Stabby Film Night, which is how I calendar our movie dates.

2. If I had planned this piece in advance I could have picked a monster movie of some sort, but the real point of the movie is to discuss what not to do against Kraus’s excellent book, and every monster movie is perfect. I’m incapable of critiquing them. For me, when it comes to monster movies, the bar is in hell.

3. And, practically speaking, chapters tend to have whitespace at start and finish, so you really do tend to turn the pages faster when you’re reading a book with lots of chapters, compared to a book with the same number of pages but way fewer chapter breaks.

4. Thanks to Erin for introducing me to this word, which, when discussing a horror movie, means some dramatic arrangement of the bodies by the killer. Say…around the table at a birthday party.

5. Is “murderer’s monologue” an official term? We can use it in our series Killing People In Diners, as suggested in a comment by Deborah Williams.