Burning Questions: Are Jump Scares Ever Not Awful?
Friday, February 8, 2013 at 8:30PM 
Michael C here. I recently caught up with Andres Muschietti’s Mama and found it to be a decent little chiller with one particularly irksome habit. It is packed end-to-end with cheap jump scares. It’s as if the studio insisted the director include a quota of brainless “Boo!” moments amid all the creepy suspense stuff that takes actual filmmaking skill.
Savvy filmgoers understand that jump scares are the worst. Apart from the fact that it requires roughly the same level of craft to startle someone with a loud noise as it does to zap them with a seat buzzer, they have the added drawback of creating distance between the audience and the film. They release tension, rather than build it. This explains their popularity among teenagers who see horror movies as a carnival ride, doling out empty “scares” with mechanical timing.
So finding a minefield of these cheap shots in another otherwise capable spook story like Mama got me thinking. Are there any defensible examples of the jump scare? Or is it an artistic sin every time it’s trotted out?
jump scares after, um, the jump.
By my accounting a genuine “jump scare” requires three elements: the shock has to emerge from out of nowhere, it must follow a period of quiet or calm, and a loud stinger must accompany it on the soundtrack. As I pored through memories of the biggest movie scares I noticed an interesting thing. Those scares that fit the definition perfectly, like Alan Arkin’s leap from the shadows in Wait Until Dark, seem lame and manipulative in retrospect. While those moments that held up well strayed outside the parameters of what we consider “jump scares”.
Take the “Sloth” scene from Se7en. I disqualify it because Fincher hides the shock in plain sight the whole time, toying with the viewer’s assumptions rather than throwing in a surprise from out of frame. Likewise, the diner nightmare scene from Mulholland Dr. flat-out tells you a shocker is coming and still manages to pull a heart-stopper through a mixture of reverse psychology and plain old killer timing. The “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” scare from Jaws does not use a soundtrack stinger at all, instead playing without a score until some ominous, orchestral rumbles emerge on the soundtrack. As for the big reveal at the end of Don’t Look Now, the lack of a traditional horror score puts no safe distance between the audience and the film as the image of the figure in the red coat is permanently etched into the fear lobe of the viewer’s brain.
And what of the mother of all jump scares, the final scene of Carrie? While I can’t argue it doesn’t meet the criteria I outlined, I would make the case DePalma elevates it above the classification. For one thing its impact is not just based on a random gotcha but is the cumulative effect of the scene’s surreal (but not too surreal) details. For another thing, the jolt on the soundtrack isn’t a true shrieking stinger but is a dramatic turn in a proper melodic score.
I’ve only been able to think of only three honest to God jump scares that fit the definition and still rise above the laziness associated them: Martin Balsam's death in Psycho, the creature reveal from The Descent and the Large Marge scene from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. The Descent earns its jump scare with forty-some minutes of restraint and suspense building. As for the glory that is Large Marge, Burton gets away it with awesome execution, simple as that. That moment catches the viewer so completely off guard, and its use of stop motion is so unexpected (and that sped up, ghoulish cackle is so crap-your-pants terrifying) that it deserves to be an exception to the rule. Psycho gets away with it because it's Psycho and the musical stinger in question is the Psycho theme. You can't really be pegged for leaning on horror cliches when you're busy inventing them.
The concepts of the movie scares is too broad for me to cover single-handedly so I turn it over to the horror buffs in the comments. What say you? I find that defensible uses of the jump scare do in fact exist, but are an extremely rare species. Am I denigrating a time-honored horror tradition? What glaring examples have I omitted?
You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm. Or read his blog Serious Film.
Reader Comments (26)
That scene in Se7en nearly killed me. I jumped up from where I was laying, screamed "FUCK THIS SHIT" and took a good five minutes to calm down. The neighbours came by. If someone had touched me, I think I would have actually killed them I was so scared.
I have finished the film, but I don't think I could watch it again.
The genius of the Sloth scene in Se7en isn't only that the jump is hiding in plain sight, but that on subsequent viewings you know it's coming but have no real way of knowing when, making it effective again.
The creature reveal in The Descent is still my favorite though. I remember I was in a friend's bedroom watching the film with a bunch of people on a small TV with the lights on and I still jumped. Good stuff.
The "Jump scare" has become part of the grammar of horror films- sometimes they work brilliantly as in "Carrie" and other times it's just sign of desperation like a loud shrieking soundtrack. They can also be overused to the point they loose impact.
When I saw "Jaws" as a nine-year-old at a kiddie matinee, it was the head rolling out "jump" that really had the audience shrieking en masse, until an older kid finally yelled "shut-up!!" Don't know if music accompanied this moment, but it wouldn't have been heard, anyway.
The title card of Cabin in the Woods is the perfect jump scare.
Shawn -
Ahhh. The head in the boat scene. Hell yes. Add that to the small list of great uses of the device. Spielberg has us so paranoid about the shark we totally have our guard down for anything else.
Jump scares can be very effective, they just have to be a rarity in horror movies and not every five seconds. One of my favorite jump scares is the telephone ring in the exorcist or the hospital kill in exorcist 3.
It's funny you mentioned The Descent, because for me, that movie blends tension, gore and jump scares in a way few movies ever had. Its a smorgasbord for horror nuts of all kinds.
One that got me good was the "girl in the closet" from The Ring. Unexpected use of flashback. But yes, there was the screech of music. She just looked so...
Bleck!
Ugh, I couldn't stand Mama. The movie. Well, I guess the character too. So dumb.
I don't know if it fits properly as a jump scare as it happens at the end of the movie, but the reveal that the murderer has been there all the time, pretending to be a dead body, in the first Saw was a great one. I don't think anyone ever saw it coming, back then when the first Saw was just Saw (sequel-less) and still considered something decent.
The efficacy of a jump scar comes down to the justification for the scar. Cat People (the original) has one of the most effective jump scares. The woman who just learned about the odd behavior of her coworker's fiance begins to hear footsteps behind her. She can't tell where they're coming from, but they're keeping pace with her no matter how fast they go. Just when she thinks she gets away there's a huge bang. The city bus has arrived. No one is behind her anymore and no one has witnessed the stalking. The scare is justified by the bizarre story the fiance is spinning about Eastern European folklore punishing women for becoming too happy.
The Strangers is one of the more effective jump scare films in recent memory. It uses Hitchcock-style suspense--we see what's going to happen before the characters do--to justify why the crazed criminals need to jump out of the darkness at the heroes.
Mama's jump scares didn't bother me as much as the concept being better suited for a dark fantasy than a straight up horror film. The original short is just the crazy stuff in the cabin; the direction of the feature had nothing to do with the far more effective scares of the original idea.
As a whole, I think Ju-On (and its American remake), is just a poor imitation of Ringu, but the shower scene, with the extra hand works beautifully. Something about the interiority and invasiveness of that hand suddenly seeming to come from your own body...
Also, and on a slightly different note, Community has a great joke about the diminishing returns of jump scares in one of its Halloween episodes, with a black cat perpetually leaping out until Troy asks 'Is someone throwing it?!'
Does that moment when that creature appears next to Barbara Hershey in "Insidious" count as a jump scare? If it does I'd say that's one of the best in recent memory. Not just because of how effective it is within the moment, but how it sets up things to come for the rest of the film.
Also any moment with Hershey is great, just because.
I never caught Insidious. It didn't look anything special but I think I may have made a mistake skipping that one. You are not the first to reference that one positively to me.
Another great moment a friend just pointed out to me - The mayor's office scene from The Dark Knight. A jump scare that works because we are so, so not prepared for the Dark Knight to pull a horror move, let alone in what appears to be a basic plot exposition scene.
Black Swan is pretty much all jump scares.
Sean C -
I would draw a distinction between scares that make you jump and "jump scares". I recall that Black Swan has more of the former. The hospital scene where she gives Winona back the stuff for example is scary not because a big shock comes out of nowhere but because the character's actions are so disturbing.
I really wouldn't classify the masturbation scene that way either because it's all on the soundtrack. It's a "Boo!" moment without the "Boo!" I realize I'm splitting hairs here, but my point is that the good directors don't settle for the simple gotcha jump scare. They do more with it.
Can you name a scene in Swan that is a legitimate jump scare moment. I'm sure I'm forgetting something.
I feel like there's a moment in Black Swan where Winona Ryder's character pops up out of nowhere in the lobby or the front of the studio. I know Mila Kunis' character pops up out of nowhere a few times. You could also argue that the arrival of the identical faced back-up dancers during the performance is also a jump scare.
The first hour of "Insedious" is a great horror movie- but once the ghost hunters show up it looses steam.
"the hospital kill in exorcist 3"
Agree with this one, just comes out of nowhere, not that kind of movie.
Have to admit though, I don't mind a good jump scene sometimes, as long as its not the only way they try to scare you.
The floating ghost in the original WOMAN IN BLACK. Anyone who's seen that British TV film from the '80s knows what I mean. Also, the red and black man in INSIDIOUS for a recent example.
Wait Until Dark.....Carrie
One very effective jump scare per movie.
I think Paranormal Activity deserves a mention in this thread. The theatrical ending was a joke, but the alternate ending where the girl is sitting at the foot of the bed rocking back in forth is a chilling moment. The whole movie did a great job avoiding the jump scares and it still managed to be terrifying.
Agree with Glenn about the original tv version of The Woman in Black. The jump scene was perfect amongst all the other creepy bits.
The end of Vertigo is the quietest jump scare ever, and it gets me every damn time.
Also, there's one GREAT jump scare in The Orphanage. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about, and if not I don't want to spoil it for you, but just in case you can't remember, I'll say: The bus. It works because the film is so restrained up to that point that it can get away with it.
"I saw her face" from The Ring.
you CANNOT see this coming