I love horror. But one of the things I find most interesting about it has nothing to do with how scary it is.

It’s how good it is at making us pay attention.

Think about a typical horror scene. Someone hears a noise upstairs. They stop. They listen. They start walking towards it. The music changes. Maybe a door is slightly open.

And then… nothing.

For what might be a full minute, very little has actually happened. Yet you’re watching more closely than you were before.

For marketers, who spend so much time thinking about how to grab attention in the first few seconds, I think there’s something interesting in that.

Horror doesn’t just grab attention. It knows how to hold it.

The bomb under the table

Alfred Hitchcock had a famous way of explaining the difference between surprise and suspense.

Imagine two people sitting at a table having a normal conversation. Suddenly, a bomb underneath the table explodes. The audience is shocked for a few seconds.

Now imagine we’ve already been shown the bomb. We know it’s there. We know it’s going to go off. The people sitting at the table don’t.

Suddenly, the exact same conversation becomes almost unbearable to watch.

The difference is information.

Hitchcock understood that suspense isn’t created by telling the audience nothing. It comes from telling them just enough.

Psychologist George Loewenstein later explored something similar through his Information Gap Theory of curiosity. The basic idea is that curiosity appears when we become aware of a gap between what we know and what we want to know.

And I think that distinction matters for brands.

We’ve all seen campaigns tease a launch with a black screen and “Something exciting is coming…”

But if I know nothing about what’s coming, why should I care?

Mystery alone doesn’t automatically create curiosity. You need to give people enough information for the missing piece to matter.

We might be revealing too much, too quickly

A lot of marketing is built around speed.

Get the logo in. Land the message. Explain the benefit. Show the product. Give them the CTA.

And there are plenty of situations where that's exactly what we should do. But I think horror gives us permission to consider the opposite sometimes.

What if we don't answer every question immediately?

What if the first piece of content creates the question, the next adds another clue and the reveal comes later?

Research into cliffhangers supports the basic principle. Studies have found that people shown unresolved endings report a stronger desire to continue to the next instalment than those given a resolved ending.

Interestingly, the cliffhanger didn't necessarily make people enjoy the content more. It made them want to continue.

That's an important difference.

We spend a lot of time trying to make every individual piece of content perform on its own. But a campaign doesn't necessarily need to be a collection of self-contained posts.

One piece can create demand for the next.

The reveal isn't always the interesting bit

This is probably the biggest lesson I take from horror.

We tend to put a lot of weight on the reveal.

The product launch. The campaign going live. The event announcement. The new brand. The big piece of content.

But horror often gets more value out of the moments before the reveal than the reveal itself.

A shadow moving in the background can be more unsettling than seeing the monster.

Footsteps upstairs can be scarier than discovering who's making them.

A closed door can hold your attention because your brain is already trying to work out what's behind it.

Research on horror and predictive processing helps explain this. Our brains are constantly trying to anticipate what's going to happen next. Horror plays with that instinct by giving us signals, allowing us to form expectations and then delaying or disrupting them.

In other words, the audience is doing some of the work. And maybe that's something marketers could use more often.

Instead of simply asking, “What do we want people to know?”, we could also ask:

“What do we want people to wonder?”

But you have to earn the payoff

There is a catch.

You can't build suspense forever.

Hitchcock himself learned this. In “Sabotage”, he builds tension around a boy unknowingly carrying a bomb. The audience knows the bomb is there and waits for him to escape.

Except he doesn't. The bomb explodes.

Hitchcock later described the decision as a mistake. After making the audience sit through all that suspense, he'd denied them the release they were waiting for.

Brands can make the same mistake.

If you've spent weeks telling me something huge is coming, what eventually arrives has to justify the attention you've asked me to give you.

The longer you build anticipation, the more you owe people at the end.

Maybe attention isn't about saying more

This doesn’t mean every campaign needs to become a six week mystery. Sometimes the best ad tells you exactly what you need to know in six seconds. But when we're trying to build a story over time, I think horror offers a useful reminder.

Attention isn't always created by adding more.

Sometimes it's about controlling what people know, when they know it and what they're left wanting to find out.

Give them enough to form a question.

Give them a reason to care about the answer.

Let them anticipate it.

And then make the reveal worth waiting for.

Because horror doesn't hold our attention by constantly showing us something scary. It holds our attention because we're waiting for something to happen.

Maybe the lesson for marketers isn't to say more. It's to get better at deciding what not to say yet.