A: And then just before the killer gets the girl and stabs her with this giants knife, the power went out and the TV went off. It was freaky.
B: Wow. That's terrifying. Was the power out for long?
A: Just for a few seconds. When everything came back on, the image on the screen was of the girl's dead body.
before the killer gets the girl and stabs her with this giants knife Why is present tense used instead of past tense? I think A watched movie in the past so past tense should be used after 'before' in this sentence.
The night before he was to leave, he was unable to sleep.
He didn't mention anything about an appointment before he left.
He ate it up before he could say knife.
I tried to find other sentences in dictionary to compare with this sentence but they made me more confused. why is present tense used after BEFORE even though A already watched the scene that killer stabs her?
Best Answer
The sentence you offer lacks tense parallelism, and most people would consider it to be grammatically problematic.
There are time when there is a tense shift to signify a contrast between two reported events. Often the earlier activities are described in the past perfect and the later activities in the past. That is not want is occurring here.
All of the events occurred sometime in the past, and while there is a sequence, using the present and shifting to the past is a bit jarring. Better approaches would be to narrate all of the activities in the present or all in the past:
or
The first example uses the present to narrate events that have occurred in the past, but that is a standard convention, creating a scenario as if the events are currently being viewed.
The phrasing makes clear what the sequence is. If you felt an overwhelming need to use tenses to emphasize the sequence, you could say (but it would sound a bit stilted):