A cliffhanger is a plot device in fiction that places a main character in an unresolved, precarious situation—such as a sudden danger, a difficult dilemma, or a shocking revelation—at the conclusion of a narrative installment. The device is designed to incentivize audience retention for subsequent installments.
Serialized narratives may conclude with textual cues such as "To Be Continued" or "The End?", and in serialized television, subsequent episodes frequently utilize a recap sequence.
Cliffhangers were used as literary devices in several works of the Middle Ages with One Thousand and One Nights ending on a cliffhanger each night. Cliffhangers appeared as an element of the Victorian era serial novel that emerged in the 1840s, with many associating the form with Charles Dickens, a pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction. Following the enormous success of Dickens, by the 1860s cliffhanger endings had become a staple part of the sensation serials.
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History
Cliffhangers were used as literary devices in several works of the Middle Ages. The Arabic literary work One Thousand and One Nights involves Scheherazade narrating a series of stories to King Shahryār for 1,001 nights, with each night ending on a cliffhanger in order to save herself from execution. Some medieval Chinese ballads like the Liu chih-yuan chu-kung-tiao ended each chapter on a cliffhanger to keep the audience in suspense.
The Scottish comic magazine The Glasgow Looking Glass, founded by English artist William Heath, pioneered the use of the phrase 'To Be Continued' in its serials in 1825.
Victorian serials
Cliffhangers became prominent with the serial publication of narrative fiction, pioneered by Charles Dickens. Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens's cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. Writing in the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum captured the anticipation of those waiting for the next installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop:
In 1841, Dickens fanboys rioted on the dock of New York Harbor, as they waited for a British ship carrying the next installment, screaming, "Is little Nell dead?"
On Dickens' instalment format and cliffhangers—first seen with The Pickwick Papers in 1836—Leslie Howsam in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015) writes, "It inspired a narrative that Dickens would explore and develop throughout his career. The instalments would typically culminate at a point in the plot that created reader anticipation and thus reader demand."
With each new instalment widely anticipated with its cliffhanger ending, Dickens' audience was enormous; his instalment format was also much more affordable and accessible to the masses, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than previous. The popularity of Dickens's serial publications saw the cliffhanger become a staple part of the sensation serials by the 1860s. His influence is also seen in television soap operas and film series, with The Guardian stating "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything."
Etymology
The term "cliff-hanger" is defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as “a serial film in which each episode ends in a desperate situation; hence, any story, play, etc., in which suspense is a main concern.” It records the first use of the term in 1936.
Some have therefore mistakenly considered its origins to have originated with the serialised version of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (which was published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left hanging off a cliff.
In his book of essays, The Art of Fiction, David Lodge refers to this moment in Hardy's novel as "a classic scene of suspense that was, as far as I know, entirely invented. The word [suspense] derives from the Latin word meaning 'to hang', and there could hardly be a situation more productive of suspense than of a man clinging by his finger-tips to the face of a cliff unable to climb to safety - hence the generic term, 'cliff-hanger'". Lodge does not claim this is the origin of the term; just that Hardy presents a literal rendering of it in prose.
Serial media
Film
Cliffhangers were especially popular from the 1910s through to the mid-1950s serials when nickelodeons and movie theatres filled the cultural niche later primarily occupied by television. The first film serial designed around the cliffhanger device was 1913's The Adventures of Kathlyn from Selig Polyscope.
Film serials were normally shown in cinemas at weekly intervals, with the cliffhanger resolved in the next instalment by a "take-out', which extracted the protagonist(s) from the perilous situation in which they had been left. Hoping that audiences would forget some important details of what they had seen a week earlier, filmmakers sometimes resolved the peril by changing some of the events in the recap sequence. The cinema scholar Deborah Allison argues that cliffhanger take-outs can be grouped into three categories, which she calls 'sequential', 'augmented' and 'incompatible'.
Sequential take-outs continue the story either by revealing pertinent facts in subsequent shots or by skipping potentially tricky explanations entirely and moving on swiftly. [...] whereas sequential take-outs fill the gaps in our knowledge after we have been shown the moment of fatal peril for the second time, augmented take-outs insert supplementary shots or scenes before the point of crisis. [...] Incompatible take-outs present narrative information that directly conflicts with that provided by the original cliffhanger.
During the 1910s, when Fort Lee, New Jersey was a centre of film production, the cliffs facing New York and the Hudson River were frequently used as film locations. The most notable of these films was The Perils of Pauline, a serial which helped popularise the term "cliffhanger". In them, the serial would often end suddenly leaving actress Pearl White's Pauline character hanging from a cliff.
Modern usage
Cliffhangers are often used in television series, especially soap operas and game shows.
Several Australian soap operas, which went off air over summer, such as Number 96, The Restless Years and Prisoner, ended each year with a major and much-publicised catastrophe, such as a character being shot in the final seconds of the year's closing episode.
Cliffhangers are commonly used in Japanese manga and anime. In contrast to American superhero comics, Japanese manga are much more frequently written with cliffhangers, often with each volume or issue. This is particularly the case with shōnen manga, especially those published by Weekly Shōnen Jump, such as Dragon Ball, Shaman King, One Piece and the origin show of the To be continued Internet meme, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
During its original run, Doctor Who was written in a serialised format that usually ended each episode within a serial on a cliffhanger. In the first few years of the show, the final episodes of each serial would have a cliffhanger that would lead into the next serial. The programme's cliffhangers sometimes caused controversy, most notably Part Three of The Deadly Assassin (1976), which was altered for future broadcasts following a complaint from campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse objected to the violence of the scene (the Doctor's head is held underwater in an attempt to drown him). She often cited it in interviews as one of the most frightening scenes in Doctor Who, her reasoning being that children would not know if the Doctor survived until the following week and that they would "have this strong image in their minds" during all that time. The producer of Doctor Who at the time, Philip Hinchcliffe, cited the 1950s radio serial Journey into Space as an influence for its use of cliffhangers. A later serial, Dragonfire (1987), is notable for having a cliffhanger that involved the Seventh Doctor literally hanging from a cliff, seemingly by choice, which has been described as "the most ludicrous ever presented in Doctor Who".
From 1966 to 1968 and in broadcast syndication, "Same bat-time, same bat-channel" encouraged viewers to tune in the next night for 120 episodes of Batman. The next episode quickly resolved the heroes from each supervillain's trap. A few triple episodes had double cliffhangers.