Sabotage

Sabotage was another of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, made in 1935. Hitchcock himself was known as the 'Master of Suspense', and this particular piece of his works has often been used to define suspense in a thriller. The extract that we watched demonstrated dramatic irony, meaning the audience knows something which a character does not. In this case, a man named Verloc is a terrorist, and he gives a package to his his sister's younger brother to take to Piccadilly Circus. The brother, a young boy does so, not knowing that the package is in actual fact a bomb, set to explode at 1:45. He is told to walk to Piccadilly Circus by 1:30, but is prevented in doing so by a number of obstacles, with deadly consequences.

How suspense and tension is built
- There are number of close ups on the bomb, and a number of close ups on the boys face, which occur more and more frequently as the time gets closer to that at which the bomb will explode.
- The music alters from an upbeat sound, parallel with the scenes of the Lord Mayors Show, to a contrapuntal "tik tok" sound, similar to a bomb, or a clock, which speeds up and becomes higher pitched as the time nears 1:45. 
- Various clocks are shown throughout the extract to emphasis the change in time, again increasingly more as time nears the time of the bomb exploding.