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I'm not really sure of the effect of suspense, because it is pretty rare for someone important to die. When they actually do die, it's more surprising after the fact than it was suspenseful before. (As examples, maybe Wash in Serenity, or Sirius in Harry Potter. Even Aeris was probably supposed to fit into that mold)

Also, I don't know how it works for most people, but I enjoy rereading books and rewatching my favorite movies. In that case, "knowing" what comes next is not an issue, but I enjoy watching it unfold.

I guess this all makes me think of the Gunslinger saga. Even in the first chapter of the first book, it kept working its way backwards, and there were many flashbacks after that, and book 4 was pretty much entirely flashbacks.

When young Roland fights his teacher to become a gunslinger, you could think, "Yawn, he's obviously gonna win, because he is a gunslinger in the "present"", but that's not what I thought. That episode was done so well that I liked seeing how it happened.

Maybe to make a connection with another type of movie, Rob Roy does NOT start in the middle; it goes from beginning to end in a linear fashion. But like I said before, you kinda doubt that they're just gonna kill the main character (they did it to Braveheart, but he had other people to keep up his fight, so it could still feel like a victory; if Rob Roy died, it would have been an anticlimax). But you wonder, HOW will they get him out of this situation? And it works, because they don't cheat.

To go back to the Gunslinger, though, it's also established that some of the Gunslinger's compatriots are killed in their youth. So, you also have to wonder throughout the whole series how that would happen. However, when they finally get to it in book 5, it's so abrupt and explains nothing (and doesn't even really fit with what was established earlier) that I can't even consider it canon. Yes, I knew WHAT would happen, but I felt cheated on the HOW.

That brings up the ultimate example: The Star Wars prequels. As far as I'm concerned, they suck. The reason is that, after watching the original trilogy, you can't possibly believe that the prequels is how they got to that point. Anakin did not invent C3PO, Yoda did not know Chewbacca, Anakin being a great pilot in Obi Wan's words did not mean he said, "Let's try spinning; that's a good trick", Luke and Leia's mother did not die for no reason, and on and on.

They didn't suck because they had no suspense because you know that Anakin and Obi Wan (and Yoda, etc) won't die. They suck because watching them unfold (which in my opinion is more fundamental to enjoying a story than just getting to the end) is nonsensical.

One of the best examples of "Who's gonna die?" and suspense is, in my opinion, Aliens. You always have to kill someone to give that feeling that "no one is safe." But maybe even that is tricky, because the "kill someone so you feel no one is safe" is also a formula, and you can recognize it as it happens. I mentioned that when discussing The Descent. The thing about Aliens, though, is that it kills a LOT of people, and EARLY in the movie. So the suspense can last a long time. Also what's great about it is that it makes you care about a lot of people. For Harry Potter, everyone's asking, "Does Harry live?" (Okay, some people are concerned about other pet favorites) But in Aliens, you're pulling for a lot of people, so it sucks when anyone dies (except Burke).