You know when something jumps out in a horror movie and it’s usually a cheap gotcha? Don’t you hate that? But sometimes it’s totally fair.
Take Jaws, for instance. When Ben Gardner’s head rolls out of the hole in the boat, it’s a cheap jump scare. It’s accompanied by a loud music cue, it’s a trick of lighting, and there’s no reason a movie about a shark should be scaring the audience with a goofy floating noggin. But when the shark leaps out of the water while Brody is throwing chum, it’s a totally fair jump scare. There is no trick of the shark leaping in from a narrowly framed shot. Instead, it relies on a shark emerging from the water. It’s a totally appropriate time and place for the shark to appear. It’s one of the all-time great jump scares and it’s totally appropriate.
So here are our picks of three jump scares that we thought were similarly fair. You can listen to our discussion by fast forwarding to the 41-minute mark of our Goon podcast.
Kellywand
3. Something about a rabbit in Cabin Boy.
2. Gah, an alien hand emerges from the pipes in Alien!
Gah, the little girl in The Ring can jump cut!
Dingus
3. Gah, the little boy is standing beside Sam Rockwell in Joshua!
2. Gah, the door moves in Paranormal Activity!
Gah, AJ Bowen’s follow up to asking “Are you the babysitter?” in House of the Devil!
Tom
3. Gah, that’s not Jim Sturgess’ girlfriend at the bathroom door in Heartless!
2. Gah, the bag in the background moves during the phone call in Audition!
Gah, the demon in Paranormal Activity howls like a wildebeest!
Okay, what are you picks for fair jump scares? It’s a tough category, but we’d love to hear what you’ve got.
That fucking corpse floating by the porthole window in Jaws. I’ve seen the movie like twenty times and it still gets me. [Edit: Maybe I should read the whole of the post before me before responding, eh?]
Also: Anthony Perkins running into frame to stab Martin Balsam at the top of the stairs in Psycho.
But, holy shit, the bag in Audition. The bag in Audition. Fuck you, Miike.
Toni Collette is doing laundry and putting away dishes in The Sixth Sense. She comes back into the kitchen, and gah! All the cabinet doors are open!
(There were quite a few jump scares in that movie. Some fair, some unfair. The kitchen one was my favorite. At this point in the movie, the audience doesn’t know what is going on. Maybe it was that creepy little kid who quickly opened the doors, maybe it was a poltergeist.)
A frightening man is trying to get past a flunky at a desk. The flunky tells him to have a seat on a bench and wait. The frightening man instead says he will return. The revving engine sounds and flash of headlights might disqualify this as a “jump scare”, adding too much horrific anticipation to terrified reaction. But it’s only for fractions of a second before this mechanical wight, this futuristic golem, this Terminator drives a car into the vestibule. Gah!
The rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns out to be as vicious as warned. Gah and Jesus Christ!
Honorable Mention: the birthday party home video in Signs. Kane’s Last Supper in Alien. The guy from Black Books gets ripped to pieces in Shaun of the Dead, even though everyone thought the zombies were safely barricaded.
Poltergeist - Mom slides the chairs under the dinner table, goes into the kitchen, and comes back by the table and yikes! The chairs are stacked into a pyramid!
The Shining - Danny Torrence turns the corner while riding his trike and booyah! Creeper twins! The only reason this is fair to me is because we had the earlier scene in which the camera followed Danny around as he rode the halls of the Overlook.
Frailty - I forget the exact circumstances but the dad chickens out of killing the person they kidnapped. Next thing you know the kid is running at the person screaming with an axe raised about his head.
The Strangers has one of my favourite jump scares, I think because it’s done without any sound or camera movement. It’s about 10 seconds after the point the video’s at in the link.
Literally didn’t even notice that UNTIL IT WAS TOOOOO LLLAAAAATTE.
So does it count as a jump scare? It seemed more sort of eerie.
I don’t watch enough films with jump scares to think of three that haven’t already been posted.
edit: oh actually when you see the dead child’s censored in Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite I jumped, it’s probably one of the most distressing things I’ve ever seen in a film.
Tom, it’s called “spring loaded cat”. Fuck your generic sounding jump-scare. Fuck it underground.
I must talk about Alien for a moment. I figure you guys discussed this but I haven’t been able to listen to the podcast yet.
Alien includes a classic, and literal, SLC scene: Ripley, Brett, and Parker have something on the motion tracker and are closing in on what they think is the creature that emerged from Kane’s belly. The thing is, I think this also qualifies as a good version of the scene for a couple of reasons. Our information exactly matches that of the characters - we think the creature is roughly cat sized. Secondly, I think the catharsis the character5 experience is pretty much equal to ours, and they openly acknowledge it. Information symmetry is not required to make this sort of scene work, but it works really well here.
But you know how lots of times people do the “here’s an SLC, and when you think everything is safe IT ISN’T”? That’s the other reason. The famous followup scene to this isn’t really very tense (how could it be? we are spent). But it sure is ominous. And then. . . the information we share with the characters is wrong. Deadly wrong.
I like the hand scene as well, which is absolutely a cleverer example of the thing. But sometimes playing it completely straight (so to speak) can work.
The two things that sell this:
The incredible build up where we get drawn into what we think is a SLC, only for it to be a false alarm. As I said above, the fakeout is not unusual.
Most scenes like this rely on close ups (if not extreme closeups), because most of them are shit, and somehow being an extreme closeup is supposed to cover up the fact that the mover makers are flailing. This scene, which sets up via the usual method, is not a close up. And oh god it’s so terrifying. I love this scene so much.
Grave Encounters - Just watched this with my son (yeah, I’m bad like that), and the scene with the tongue on the ground, and the cause of said tongue. I think this counts as fair because hey, tongue on the ground. Definitely a recent favorite found footage movie.
Paranormal Activity 2 - Hey, I thought the movie was over, wtf is she doing there?!?!
Lake Mungo - I would love nothing more than to see the still photos again to see all of the ‘hidden’ extras that were supposedly in the shots without having to watch the movie again, but beyond that, what was found on the video camera should certainly qualify.
Mr. Dog, a cat scare is a subset of the jump scare. And although you’re welcome to just list jump scares like most of the other folks in this thread, I can’t think of a single cat scare that I consider “fair”. By their very nature, cat scares are cheap gotchas based on misdirection. But this thread turned into “list jump scares” quicker than you can toss a small animal at a scantily clad ingenue, so carry on.
However, charmtrap totally nailed it. That bit from Exorcist III is classic and exactly what I’m talking about when the topic came to mind. I am kicking myself for not remember that. Well played, Mr. Trap.
Also, DJ South Carolina Man, I’m glad you brought up Sixth Sense, because that was a great scene when Tobe Hooper did it in Poltergeist. :) I think that’s where I got my first inkling that what M. Night Shyamalan really wanted to be was a straight-up genre director.
You’re not horrible, you’re just young. Which is a subset of horrible.
I don’t think Poltergeist holds up very well. Also, there’s a fair bit of Hollywood apocryphya about how Hooper’s creative control was essentially overridden by Spielberg, which I’m inclined to believe given how the movie has almost none of Hooper’s grittiness (see also, Peter Jackson directing The Frighteners, which felt far more like a Robert Zemeckis movie than a movie from the guy who did Dead Alive).
Well, I’m too young to have seen it when it came out (I was 4), but I’ve certainly seen Chainsaw. I’m pretty sure I spent my life thinking Spielberg directed Poltergeist, so that’s why I’ve never seen it.
Interestingly, though, I did know about the kitchen scene. I’m pretty sure you guys have used it in a 3x3 before. Or perhaps it came up when you talked about the Paranormal Activity movie that used it.
I remember jumping at the end of Enemy at the Gates when Jude Law blasted Ed Harris. Instead of shooting him right away it was drawn out a bit and even though I knew it was coming it still made me jump the first time. No idea if anyone else reacted to that scene that way.
