'Suspense' is one of the earliest cinematic thrillers... and it's still highly effective

Suspense (1913)
Starring: Lois Weber, Sam Kaufman, Valentine Paul, Douglas Gerard, and Lule Warrenton
Directors: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

A young woman (Weber) is home alone with baby when a homicidal hobo (Kaufman) decides to break into the isolated house.

"Suspense" is a film that lives up to its title. It's a very early cinematic thriller that doesn't waste a second of its ten-minute running time on anything that doesn't build suspense. From establishing the house's isolation, to presenting the home invader in a sinister fashion, though the husband's desperate attempt to make it home to save his wife after her plea for help is cut off in mid-sentence... it's all edge-of-your-seat stuff. The film is strengthened further by fairly restrained performances (compared to what you might find in other films from this time).

What makes "Suspense" even more entertaining and engaging for modern viewers is the creative and, for the time, innovative approach taken in the cinematography. There's an impressive use of three-way split-screen at various points in the film when the wife is on the phone with her husband, as the deadly intruder is drawing closer. There are also numerous shots that use mirrors to expand the visual depth of a scene, or to allow the viewer to see what is going on in two different directions. Overall, the way the film elegantly shows events happening simultaneously at different locations, or tries to give a sense of a 360-degree view of the unfolding action, is exciting stuff even more than 115 years later. (The only thing that keeps this film from getting a Ten of Ten rating is that the ending isn't quite what it could have been, I think. But it's a very narrow miss.)

Several different versions of "Suspense" is available for viewing on YouTube. It can also be found streaming on Netflix as part of the "Early Women Filmmakers" package under the Classics category. The Netflix version has a better musical soundtrack than any of the ones I checked out on YouTube, but for those of you without Netflix who want to take ten minutes to watch this great film, I've embedded the best of the YouTube versions below.


Trivia: Lois Weber appeared in over 140 films, and she directed or co-directed roughly 100 of those. During the early 1920s, she was counted among Universal Pictures' best directors, but after her personal production company went bankrupt, her career stalled.