Here’s something to consider. I immediately thought of Hitchcock’s metaphor of filmmaker as “emotional” organist, playing each key to create a specific emotional response.
Tense film scenes trigger brain activity: New ways to predict how audiences will respond:
From the article:
Two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Bang! You’re Dead” and Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” contained moments of high drama expected to trigger responses. The third, an amateur film of people walking on a college campus, was used as a control.
“We found moments of high correlation (between brainwave activity during separate viewings) and moments when this did not occur,” said Dr. Lucas C. Parra, Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Biomedical Engineering in CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering, and a corresponding author. “By looking at patterns of oscillation we could tell at which moments a person was particularly engaged. Additionally, we could see whether the correlation occurred across subjects and repeated viewings.
Measurements along the EEG alpha activity scale show the degree ofattentiveness in a person, he explained. When the oscillations are strong, a person is relaxed, i.e. not engaged. When a person is very attentive, alpha activity is low.
Peaks in engagement were correlated to three kinds of scenes, said Dr. Jasek Dmochowski, a post-doctoral fellow in the Grove School and a corresponding author. They included moments with powerful visual cues, such as a close-up on the gun in “Bang! You’re Dead,” scenes with ominous music in which the visual component was not significant, and meaningful scene changes.
Hitch’s Vertigo 