Jump Scares
I don’t consider myself a lover of horror movies but I do enjoy them from time to time and for what they are they’re really not that bad. Horror movies in the past ten years have gotten a really bad rap for relying heavily on “cheap” tactics such as jump scares. The art of the jump scare is fairly simple: have someone or something quickly and unexpectedly jump into the frame during a tense moment. Jump scares have been in horror movies for years but it was Wes Craven that turned them into an overused staple in the Scream franchise. He used them constantly in the first movie, even when non-killer characters were entering the frame, because Scream was in many ways lampooning all the classic horror tropes.
The irony is that his particular way of making fun of jump scares was so effective that every horror director since has been copying his work. The problem with jump scares is that horror aficionados actually hate them. They’re seen as tacky and nothing but an artless scare. So let’s look at why jump scares have become so prevalent and what the future holds for the horror genre.
The Jaded Effect
The modern horror movie watcher is a lot more difficult to scare than say twenty, thirty or forty years ago. I remember a friend of my father’s telling me that “The Exorcist” terrified her when she saw it as a teenager in the seventies and that she screamed out loud in the theater. Have you seen “The Exorcist” recently? It’s rather tame by today’s standards. The eerie scenes still hold up as being unsettling but the actual ending involving the two priests exorcising the demon from the little girl isn’t that exciting anymore. We the audience have simply become more jaded and are harder to scare than our parents because of our constant exposure to horror. You would be hard pressed to not find at least a single horror movie on cable any day of the week so our generation has had constant access to horror movies, making us slightly number. Not to mention the fact that television directors have been using tropes from horror movies for decades to spice up their shows, especially during Halloween episodes. We’ve seen it all and we’ve seen it twice so we’re just not that impressed anymore.
The CG effect
Computer Generated graphics are a marvel to behold and they can now do things in movies that were nothing more than a pipe dream when we were kids but CG effects are never fully believable. Years ago adding CG to live action used to make the entire image softer which would in effect tell the audience that what they were seeing wasn’t real, but for the most part they’ve licked that problem. So what is it about CG that is still so unbelievable? Perhaps the technology is still too young and in a decade or so we’ll see some truly eye popping stuff but I suspect the problem is far deeper than that. Perhaps on some subconscious level our minds can immediately identify something as being impossible and thus we see it as fake. Regardless of the cause, the heavy use of CG in movies, including horror movies, has lead to audiences being less afraid of movie monsters. Filmmakers have to rely on jump scares to get those kids squirming because CG werewolves sure as hell aren’t doing it.
The Buffy Effect
Our generation, perhaps more than any other, has been exposed to movie and television monster ass-kickers. We’re talking everything from the Ghostbusters to Buffy to the Corys in “The Lost Boys.” Even in traditional horror movies the monster is invariably stopped by some photogenic teenagers. If a bunch of good-looking teenage schmucks can kill Jason Voorhees, how scary can he really be? We’ve seen far too many monsters get killed by dumb luck or through hijinks to take them seriously. To this day whenever I watch a horror movie I think hey, I could totally kill that monster. I thought about that a lot during “Twilight.” A lot. The bottom line is that movie monsters are less scary by virtue of the people they have killing them in the movies. In the recent Freddy Krueger remake, Krueger was taken down by this girl.
Does this girl look tough to you? Does she look like a badass girl that could beat the demonic spirit of a child molester that was burned to death? The only way I'd believe that she killed Freddy is if she read him her teen angst/beret inspired poetry and he just killed himself.
Conclusion
The jump scare is a guaranteed scare in a world where it’s legitimately hard to make a scary movie. It’s either that or excessive gore like the “Saw” series and frankly I prefer the former.
The irony is that his particular way of making fun of jump scares was so effective that every horror director since has been copying his work. The problem with jump scares is that horror aficionados actually hate them. They’re seen as tacky and nothing but an artless scare. So let’s look at why jump scares have become so prevalent and what the future holds for the horror genre.
The Jaded Effect
The modern horror movie watcher is a lot more difficult to scare than say twenty, thirty or forty years ago. I remember a friend of my father’s telling me that “The Exorcist” terrified her when she saw it as a teenager in the seventies and that she screamed out loud in the theater. Have you seen “The Exorcist” recently? It’s rather tame by today’s standards. The eerie scenes still hold up as being unsettling but the actual ending involving the two priests exorcising the demon from the little girl isn’t that exciting anymore. We the audience have simply become more jaded and are harder to scare than our parents because of our constant exposure to horror. You would be hard pressed to not find at least a single horror movie on cable any day of the week so our generation has had constant access to horror movies, making us slightly number. Not to mention the fact that television directors have been using tropes from horror movies for decades to spice up their shows, especially during Halloween episodes. We’ve seen it all and we’ve seen it twice so we’re just not that impressed anymore.
The CG effect
Computer Generated graphics are a marvel to behold and they can now do things in movies that were nothing more than a pipe dream when we were kids but CG effects are never fully believable. Years ago adding CG to live action used to make the entire image softer which would in effect tell the audience that what they were seeing wasn’t real, but for the most part they’ve licked that problem. So what is it about CG that is still so unbelievable? Perhaps the technology is still too young and in a decade or so we’ll see some truly eye popping stuff but I suspect the problem is far deeper than that. Perhaps on some subconscious level our minds can immediately identify something as being impossible and thus we see it as fake. Regardless of the cause, the heavy use of CG in movies, including horror movies, has lead to audiences being less afraid of movie monsters. Filmmakers have to rely on jump scares to get those kids squirming because CG werewolves sure as hell aren’t doing it.
The Buffy Effect
Our generation, perhaps more than any other, has been exposed to movie and television monster ass-kickers. We’re talking everything from the Ghostbusters to Buffy to the Corys in “The Lost Boys.” Even in traditional horror movies the monster is invariably stopped by some photogenic teenagers. If a bunch of good-looking teenage schmucks can kill Jason Voorhees, how scary can he really be? We’ve seen far too many monsters get killed by dumb luck or through hijinks to take them seriously. To this day whenever I watch a horror movie I think hey, I could totally kill that monster. I thought about that a lot during “Twilight.” A lot. The bottom line is that movie monsters are less scary by virtue of the people they have killing them in the movies. In the recent Freddy Krueger remake, Krueger was taken down by this girl.
Does this girl look tough to you? Does she look like a badass girl that could beat the demonic spirit of a child molester that was burned to death? The only way I'd believe that she killed Freddy is if she read him her teen angst/beret inspired poetry and he just killed himself.
Conclusion
The jump scare is a guaranteed scare in a world where it’s legitimately hard to make a scary movie. It’s either that or excessive gore like the “Saw” series and frankly I prefer the former.