10 Genius Suspense Tricks That Made Horror Movies Great
4. Non-Linear Editing Keeps The Audience Uneasy - Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg's all-timer horror film Don't Look Now would be a powerful tale of grief even were it structured like a more conventional movie, but Roeg's ground-breaking non-linear editing style takes it to a whole other level.
Throughout the film, the past, present, and future are regularly spliced together without much immediate context for the viewer.
This immediately puts the audience on the backfoot and leaves them unsure of precisely what they're seeing - just like protagonist John (Donald Sutherland) as he begins witnessing bizarre visions he can't quite square.
That's because, of course, the movie's ending reveals that John has been seeing premonitions of his own impending death, moments before he's murdered by a serial killer in Venice.
Just like John, we think we're seeing an increasingly unsettling array of images in the present, only to later learn that they're flashes of what's to come.
But Roeg also utilises non-linear editing in other ways to throw the audience off, simply by doing something totally unexpected.
Even the sex scene between John and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) is presented in a fragmented style like viewers have probably never seen before.
Ultimately the editing not only dovetails perfectly into the film's central thematic - of a man unknowingly seeing his own doomed fate - but is vital in continually jarring the audience and keeping them uncomfortable.