There are no good jump scares in movies.

My critique is a bit more focused than just “use techniques well” - I’m specifically saying they should only be used when they fit the material, which IMO is fairly rare.

And THAT is the kind of thing that I think is a problem. What if flashbacks don’t help the material? What if flashbacks clutter up an already complex narrative needlessly? What if flashbacks disrupt the flow of a slow burn that was going to take a while to get going and now it’s sputtering like an old Pinto gasping for leaded fuel?

It seems to me the questions that needs to be answered before using a technique is, “what does this technique add to the work?” and also “does what the technique add outweigh the opportunity cost of using a technique?”

And I guess that last point is one I haven’t expounded on yet but I think is profound: there’s a reason that conventional narrative flow and the 3 act structure are so traditional: they freaking work (most of the time) and they are also well understood by the audience. When a creator does something different, there is an opportunity cost, even if the technique works well. Readers lost track of multiple POVs. I’ve heard people try to describe the plot of multi-POV books and it was just a mess. Viewers also have trouble following too many time jumps. Tom hates jump scares and their use detracts from the movie for him. For me, too much multi-POV and/or too many time jumps dilutes the impact of scenes and can destroy the pacing that is often key to good drama (or comedy).

So I’d really like creators to be cognizant of these tradeoffs and to consider when using techniques is appropriate. I fully understand the idea of trying to stand out but using technique merely to get attention IMO is pretty much a red flag for gimmickry.

Yes, I understood! Sorry. I didn’t mean to lump in what you had said to my silly observation. :)

I always discuss opportunity cost with them. Such a handy concept! Often the multiple timelines thing means you’re now telling two stories instead of one (similar to how main plots and subplots work but trickier) and that means you now have half the time or page space for each of those stories.

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was an extraordinary accomplishment for how it turned a traditional, linear story into (as she said) a cubist structure with its blend of adulthood and childhood, present day, memory, and nostalgia. She used two colors in the script to represent the two timelines, black text for present day, red text for the past. In the film, you can tell where you are in time based on the color palette and cinematography and I love how she found a simple way to simulate that on the page. Such a beautiful example of non-linear story structure servicing the material.

So a couple years ago, I shared the early pages of the script with my students on week 1. At the end of the semester, a student turned in a short script with 4 different colored fonts representing four different timelines. It was a confusing mess and he got really defensive and pissy when nobody understood it. So much of my job is spent driving home thinking, “Did they really need me to tell them not to do that?!”

It’s exactly like parenthood.

I feel like jump scares should be used sparingly. As a technique, I don’t ALWAYS hate it, if it’s earned. But if a movie wants to be “scary” it needs to be more than just “startling.”

I think my favorite scary movie is The Descent. It has a couple of jump scares, it has weird little creatures, but they don’t show up until like halfway in, and the movie has already built a wonderful atmosphere of creepy tension just by virtue of what’s going on – spelunking gone wrong, claustrophobia, etc. It’s a great movie start to finish, and I don’t mind the few jump scares they throw in, because they don’t rely on it as being the primary source of “scary.”

Do you think this has anything to do with Tarantino? I feel like he really popularised that dovetailed structure which now seems to be absolutely everywhere.

Definitely! Christopher Nolan too.

Of course, both of those filmmakers are too old to be a primary influence for my current crop of teenagers. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult to point to primary influences as their viewing habits have splintered off in 10,000 different directions, most of which are Tik Tok dance videos in portrait mode.

The Jump Scare which worked the best for me, and still resonates almost 40 years later, is the Clown from Poltergeist.They set that bit up for the entire movie, and then

The kid is raising the comforter in absolute terror that the Clown is going to be under the bed (after he notices it’s gone from the chair in the lightning strike, and the audience 100% expects it too, but then it’s not, and there’s a half second of relief that it’s not there, and then BAM. it attacks the kid from behind

Probably the most effective jump scare I can recall - it plays into audience expectations with foreshadowing, and light, as well as sound, and then still manages to pull it off, and I also remember my godmother in the theater with us just completely throwing the popcorn container into the sky when it happened.

LOL!

I feel like we’re learning how completely and thoroughly Spielberg invented jump scares.

Actually directed by Tobe Hooper! (tho written and produced by Spielberg).

Thanks for the clarification! I do, in fact, know that but I wasn’t precise.

And I completely stand by my original point! :)

Although there is this running theory that Steven Spielberg actually did direct Poltergeist. There are tons of articles about it online - here’s one where a crewmember seems to confirm it’s true.

Dear God. Tarantino and Nolan too old!!??? Yeesh, now I’m really feeling somewhat over the hill.


15 POSTS LATER


I think cultural trends can definitely take the wind out of the sails for a film technique too. The Matrix barely registers as significant to some of my friends who’ve only recently seen it for the first time. Much of what was revolutionary then is pedestrian now, even overdone. Mind you, I still think The Matrix’s action choreography, special effects, framing, and editing are all pitch perfect, a prime example of action serving the story. But watching it now is like revisiting Half-Life now. You can’t undo the last two decades of added context. You can never be young again.

For me, the thing that’s missing from that first viewing isn’t the impact of the special effects. It’s the sense of mystery in the first act that can never be recaptured. There’s another discussion to be had on which film/story techniques are more durable upon repeated viewing. Mystery has got to be one of the toughest, although I’d wager something like Memento or Knives Out demands to be watched at least twice. The durability of a film technique, both in a cultural context over time and in an individual film upon repeated viewing, is distinct from its cheapness or cleverness, but they both get at the fundamentals of quality storytelling in similar ways.

Community could have pulled this off, but it would have used comedy to do it. Silliness bends all the rules, and Community knew the rules of story very well indeed.

All right, I get that this topic was probably intended to be taken to a farm upstate to live out its days in peace, but since you guys were earlier talking about ‘The Old Man’ and I just watched it over the weekend, I had to call out that there was totally a jump scare in the first episode! I’m going to spoiler it:

Near the end of the episode when Dan pulls off the main road while being tailed, the agents find the tracking device and stand around figuring out what to do next. Everyone thinks Dan is gone when suddenly his truck roars out of nowhere and smashes into the agents’ truck as well as flattening one of the agents. I literally jumped! My wife laughed at me.

Yeah, that was a good one!

At the risk of continuing to push a thread beyond its lifecycle, I had a chat with a friend about The VVitch yesterday. The fact that it has almost no jump scares but has all the hallmarks of one about to come (screeching strings, weird camera angles, etc.) is what makes the film so unsettling.

It never really provides the catharsis and release of tension that a jump scare can provide, leaving the viewer feeling very out of sorts…

Hell, I’ll keep it going: I was in a viewing desert and saw The Reef, which I was sure I had heard of at some point, so I gave it a try. I didn’t make it through, but the first 2/3 has 3 or 4 really, really bad jump scares. The ones where you know it’s going to be a jump scare but it’s not the right time for a real scare so it’s going to be a fake scare, along with the musical sting and the camera switch, etc. etc. I searched and saw that generally Qt3 wasn’t a fan either, I’m firmly in that camp.

Ha ha, you saw The Reef. The sequel just came out, you know. You’re not gonna leave me hanging and NOT see the sequel, are you? :)

On an unrelated note, one of my favorite movies so far this year is a horror movie called What Josiah Saw, directed by Vincent Grashaw (he previously made a movie called And Then I Go, which I need to see now) and written by a newcomer named Robert Alan Dilts. The script and direction are both rich with some wonderfully textured Texas Gothic. There are even chapters with titles like “Eli and the Gypsies”. Who doesn’t want to see a movie called What Josiah Saw, with chapters that have names like “Eli and the Gypsies” and “The Ghost of Willow Road”? Right? Well, it gets my stamp of approval and it’s got a slot on my top ten so far.

Anyway, you can’t really discuss the specific jump scare and its implications without going deep into experience-destroying spoiler territory, but there’s an absolutely fascinating jump scare that consists entirely of an audio cue and an actor responding to it. There is literally no visual onscreen component. You get jump-scared, but you have no idea what the scare actually is! And even though it happens fairly early, the significance of the moment isn’t clear until far later in the movie.

As an inveterate jump-scare hater, I’m not saying it’s a good jump scare. But I am saying it’s a fascinating one!

NOTE: The discussion for What Josiah Saw got moved here.

Fathom events/TCM doing the 40th anniversary theater showings of one of the top jump scare movies in my list in a couple of weeks:

Ooh! I forgot about this one! It’s the classic cockatoo screech from Citizen Kane.

According to Peter Bogdanovich’s commentary, Welles told him he put the cockatoo there to wake the audience up during what he felt was a slow period. Cheap shot, Welles!

Did Orson Welles invent the jump scare?