How I learned to build unbearable tension using algorithms instead of actors

The cursor blinked mockingly at me from the empty prompt box. Three hours into my first serious attempt at creating a suspenseful short film using AI video generation, and I had produced nothing but pretty landscapes and awkward character movements. My protagonist walked through doors, sat at tables, even looked dramatically out windows—but there was no tension, no suspense, no reason for the audience to care.

Then I remembered Hitchcock’s famous bomb analogy.

“There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,'” the Master of Suspense once explained. “If you have people sitting at a table playing cards, and suddenly a bomb explodes, you get five seconds of shock. But if you show the audience the bomb first, then show the same card game, you get five minutes of suspense—because now they know something the characters don’t.”

That’s when it clicked: AI doesn’t understand suspense naturally, but it can follow a formula. And Hitchcock, more than any filmmaker, had turned suspense into a precise science.

The Hitchcock Formula Decoded

Before diving into text-to-video prompts, we need to understand the underlying architecture of Hitchcockian suspense. Hitchcock believed that information and suspense went hand in hand—he believed in showing the audience what the character was unaware of. His approach involved a combination of music, sound, cinematography, editing, and narrative structure, each carefully orchestrated to evoke unease and anticipation.

But how do you translate this into prompts for an AI that thinks in pixels, not psychology?

The Five-Beat Hitchcockian Structure for AI

After months of experimentation with various text-to-video platforms—from Runway to Veo to Kling AI—I developed a five-beat structure that consistently generates genuine suspense:

Beat 1: The Ordinary World (Establishment)

Purpose: Create normalcy that will soon be threatened AI Challenge: Avoiding generic “establishing shot” blandness

Effective Prompt Structure:

Peaceful suburban kitchen, morning sunlight streaming through sheer curtains. Woman in yellow robe making coffee, humming softly. Steam rises from mug. Everything appears perfectly normal and safe. Shot holds for 3 seconds, emphasizing tranquility. 1950s domestic aesthetic, warm color palette, soft focus on background.

Key Technique: Use simplistic, linear stories that the audience can easily follow, removing all extraneous material to offer maximum dramatic impact. The prompt specifies duration and emotional tone, giving AI clear parameters for the scene’s rhythm.

Beat 2: The Plant (Information Advantage)

Purpose: Show the audience the threat unknown to the character AI Challenge: Creating visual tension without obvious horror elements

Effective Prompt Structure:

Close-up: Kitchen counter drawer slightly ajar. Inside, glimpse of blood-stained knife partially hidden beneath kitchen towels. Camera slowly pushes closer, revealing more of the blade. Woman's humming continues off-screen, oblivious to the danger nearby. Dark shadows contrast with bright kitchen lighting. Extreme macro photography style.

Critical Element: Include explicit keywords like “switch to [new shot]” to indicate transitions between shots, but more importantly, specify the character’s ignorance of the threat. This knowledge imbalance is the engine of Hitchcockian suspense.

Beat 3: The Building Tension (Prolonged Anxiety)

Purpose: Stretch time while the audience knows more than the character AI Challenge: Creating duration and escalation within single prompts

Effective Prompt Structure:

Woman walks toward the drawer, coffee mug in hand, still humming peacefully. Each step builds tension. She reaches for the drawer handle. Extreme slow motion as her fingers approach the handle. Camera alternates between her innocent face and the concealed weapon. Music becomes subtle but increasingly discordant. Hitchcockian camera angles, Dutch tilts increasing with each cut.

Advanced Technique: Test prompts with short videos first, then scale up to longer videos. This beat requires the most refinement because AI tends to rush through actions that should unfold slowly.

Beat 4: The False Relief or Misdirection

Purpose: Momentarily redirect tension before the climax AI Challenge: Creating believable character behavior that serves the plot

Effective Prompt Structure:

Woman's phone rings. She turns away from the drawer, distracted. Answers cheerfully: "Hello, Sarah!" Walks to living room, coffee forgotten. Camera lingers on the still-open drawer, threat temporarily avoided but still present. Audience exhales slightly, but tension remains. Bright, normal lighting returns momentarily.

Psychological Insight: The audience wants the character to discover the threat because there’s a damn bomb that’s going to blow them to smithereens! This beat plays with that desire, offering false hope while maintaining underlying dread.

Beat 5: The Payoff (Revelation or Climax)

Purpose: Deliver on the suspenseful buildup AI Challenge: Creating satisfying resolution without anticlimax

Effective Prompt Structure:

Phone call ends. Woman returns to kitchen. Opens drawer fully to retrieve dish towel. Discovers knife, screams, drops mug. Coffee splashes across white tile floor. Extreme close-up on her terrified face, then quick cut to knife gleaming in morning light. All sound cuts to silence for 2 seconds, then crescendo. High contrast, stark shadows, film noir lighting.

Advanced Hitchcockian AI Techniques

The MacGuffin Prompt Method

Hitchcock’s famous “MacGuffin”—the thing everyone wants that drives the plot—translates beautifully to AI prompts:

Mysterious briefcase sits unopened on park bench. Various characters glance at it nervously as they pass. Each person's body language suggests they know its importance, but audience remains ignorant. Create tension through character behavior rather than revealing contents. Paranoid thriller aesthetic, multiple suspicious glances, urban setting.

The Shower Scene Structure

Hitchcock’s approach in ‘Psycho’ carefully orchestrated music, sound, cinematography, and editing to create unease. For AI, this translates to layering multiple tension elements:

Bathroom mirror reflects multiple angles of woman's face as she brushes teeth. Shadow moves across bathroom door behind her, but she doesn't notice. Camera slowly zooms on her reflection while background grows darker. Rhythmic sound of brushing teeth becomes increasingly loud and mechanical. Film grain increases, creating unease. Classic horror cinematography.

The Vertigo Zoom (Dolly Zoom for AI)

Camera positioned behind man looking down stairwell. Simultaneously zoom in on subject while camera pulls back, creating disorienting perspective shift. Subject's increasing anxiety visible in body language. Stairwell appears to stretch infinitely downward. Vertigo-inducing camera movement, psychological thriller style, high contrast lighting.

Common AI Suspense Failures and Solutions

Failure 1: Generic Horror Instead of Psychological Tension

Problem: AI defaults to obvious scary imagery Solution: Focus on ordinary objects in threatening contexts

Wrong: "Bloody monster jumps out"
Right: "Child's toy slowly rocks by itself in empty nursery, afternoon sunlight streaming through windows"

Failure 2: Rushing the Build-up

Problem: AI creates action too quickly Solution: Explicitly specify slow pacing and duration

Wrong: "Woman discovers threat"
Right: "Woman slowly approaches potential threat over 10 seconds, each step deliberate and hesitant"

Failure 3: Lack of Character Ignorance

Problem: AI shows aware characters instead of oblivious ones Solution: Explicitly state the character’s ignorance

Wrong: "Man sees danger approaching"
Right: "Man continues reading newspaper, completely unaware of figure approaching from behind"

The Platform-Specific Adaptations

For Runway ML:

• Emphasize camera movement and cinematic language
• Include specific shot types: “Dutch angle,” “extreme close-up,” “tracking shot”
• Reference film styles: “Hitchcockian,” “film noir,” “psychological thriller”

For Google Veo:

• Take advantage of synchronized audio including dialogue and sound effects
• Specify both visual and audio elements in prompts
• Use temporal markers: “for 3 seconds,” “gradually builds,” “sudden silence”

For Kling AI:

• Focus on clear descriptions, exact details, and proper structure
• Break complex suspense sequences into multiple shorter prompts
• Test timing with brief clips before committing to full sequences

The Psychology Behind the Prompts

What makes this approach work isn’t just technical—it’s psychological. Hitchcock used identification of audiences and their viewpoint, getting them involved in the scene itself. When prompting AI, we’re essentially programming this identification process.

The key insight: AI can simulate the mechanics of suspense even if it doesn’t understand the emotion. By providing clear structural beats and specific visual directions, we guide the AI toward creating the conditions for suspense—knowledge imbalance, prolonged tension, and eventual payoff.

Your First Hitchcockian AI Short

Here’s a complete five-beat prompt sequence to try:

Beat 1 (Establishment):

Cozy coffee shop, late afternoon. Elderly man sits alone reading newspaper, steam rising from his cup. Peaceful urban sounds, warm lighting. Everything appears safe and routine. Hold shot for 3 seconds to establish normalcy.

Beat 2 (Plant):

Close-up: Man's newspaper headline reads "ESCAPED CONVICT STILL AT LARGE - CONSIDERED DANGEROUS." Camera slowly zooms on mugshot photo. Cut to: Same face visible through coffee shop window, watching the elderly man intently. Man inside remains absorbed in reading, unaware of being watched.

Beat 3 (Building Tension):

Escaped convict enters coffee shop, orders coffee. Elderly man still reading, oblivious. Convict sits at table behind him, close enough to touch. Camera alternates between convict's intense stare and elderly man's peaceful ignorance. Tension builds through proximity and audience knowledge.

Beat 4 (False Relief):

Elderly man's phone rings. He answers, laughs warmly, completely relaxed. "Yes, dear, I'll be home soon." Convict watches this display of vulnerability. False sense of security as old man seems protected by normal life continuing.

Beat 5 (Payoff):

Elderly man stands to leave. Convict follows. At the door, old man drops his keys. Both men bend to pick them up simultaneously. Their eyes meet. Recognition flashes across elderly man's face as he realizes the danger. Extreme close-up on both faces in moment of mutual recognition.

The Future of Algorithmic Suspense

What excites me most about this exploration is how it reveals AI’s potential for understanding human psychology through structure rather than emotion. We’re teaching machines to create feelings they can’t experience by following patterns perfected by cinema’s greatest psychological manipulator.

The year 2025 may mark the moment when individual creators can craft Hitchcockian suspense with the same precision as the Master himself—not by understanding psychology, but by following his mathematical approach to audience manipulation.

As AI video generation tools become more sophisticated, the filmmakers who understand how to translate classical techniques into algorithmic language will create the most compelling content. We’re not just prompting AI to make pretty pictures—we’re programming it to understand the darkest corners of human psychology.

What tension will you build next?

Next Week: “Programming Kubrickian Symmetry: How AI Learned to Frame Like a Master”

Try it Yourself: Take any ordinary situation from your daily life and run it through the five-beat structure. The results might surprise—and unnerve—you.