But then you wouldn’t have got to enjoy my lame attempts to derail this thread into 1) vidjagames 2) books 3) spiders (I wanna turn every thread into a spider thread)
SPEAKING OF are facehuggers spiders?! they have eight legs! and lend themselves well to jump scares. (i’ll also commend them for being strongly vaginal, which bothers some men.)
I got a huge kick seeing the 25th director’s cut version of Alien in the cinema (alas, I was too young to be allowed to see the original release in theatres, being -4 at the time). I knew every jump scare by heart, of course, but i really got a thrill out of watching people who’d never seen it before react so strongly to it. for an old film it really punches above its weight.
Alien(s) are my top jump scare movies, I saw them in my very early teens (tho i’d been a ‘fan’ for years (don’t ask))
edit: this bbs is weirdly combative a lot of the time isn’t it =(
I’d like to move this discussion in a more meta direction and talk about the misuse and overuse of technique more generally in films, TV, and books in recent decades. If Tom thinks this should be a separate thread, that’s fine. (I started a thread in the books forum about this last year.)
I’d like to step away from the narrow issue of “no good jump scares” b/c I feel that’s kind of a semantic issue. Tom has defined “jump scare” in such a way that there are no good ones. However, I feel what Tom is describing is actually a misuse of the technique of “sudden use of fright or shock” in film, which IMO is a legitimate technique, IF used properly to fit the materials and the skills of the writers/actors.
And I would posit that pretty much ALL writing and filming techniques require similar caveats: they can all be a big positive, if they fit the material and if the writers/directors/actors/showrunners have the chops to pull the technique off well. If techniques are NOT used well, they can become cheap gimmicks and/or damage the quality of the work, and/or turn off viewers/readers big time.
To my point of view, we have seen a vast surge in the use of technique in multiple media in recent decades. I’ve talked about the misuse and overuse of multiple POVs in fantasy for example. Alan Sepinwall had a good article a few months back about the misuse and overuse of time jumps.
My theory is that in the current era of the explosion of publication by means of Kindle et. al., the explosion of TV with streaming, and the explosion of film with indie productions, that a lot of creators feel an exaggerated need to “stand out” and that the misuse and overuse of technique results from a desire to “pop” from the general narrative, to burst out of standard storytelling and say “Hey! Look at me!” That may catch eyeballs but does not IMO often result in better art or entertainment.
There may be other causes, follow-the-leader-itis, and various other things.
But I think you can look at our entertainment landscape and see the misuse and overuse of technique all over the place, turning useful creative techniques into gimmicks, essentially.
And the jump scare, as defined by Tom, is an example of that.
Ah, that’s a shame. I was quite enjoying the conversation. I’ve never particularly liked jump scares and often dismiss them. It was fun thinking about places where they actually work.
I thought it was always playfully contentious, not actual contentious. Just gotta give one another the benefit of the doubt. I suppose folks get touchy when their freedoms get stripped away.
Good post, Sharpe! You touched on a bunch of things I think about often.
This reminds me of the all-purpose “if done well” caveat that often gets used in forum discussions about shows, movies, games, etc… For example, “Lord of the Rings as a western could be really cool if it was done well.”
Well, sure, anything is good if it’s done well! That’s literally what the words mean! :) I get what folks mean when they say that but it always makes me laugh.
And you’re right about more advanced techniques (including jump scares, storytelling techniques, etc) getting used over and over in more mainstream entertainment these days. Storytellers and audiences alike are getting far more sophisticated.
Shows like Breeders or The Old Man telling their full stories across multiple timelines. A silent episode (Only Murders) or a totally unique short story with only loose thematic connection (Mythic Quest) etc. These episodes usually come around 2/3rds of the way through a season where the change to falling action would go in a story or where the bridge would go in songwriting. Throw a dart at your thumbnails on your streaming service of choice and you’ll hit a show that’s using a variation on these advanced narrative techniques.
The result of all that, for me, as I try to teach traditional three-act structure, is that my students increasingly seem to think that good story structure means using flashbacks. I had an epiphany this past semester when I was reading the opening scene of Whiplash with them.
That paragraph on page 2 where Andrew “really shows off this time” when all Fletcher is looking for is basic rudiments is a really insightful moment. I especially love the line “He gets it.”
I experience a version of this quite often in my work but I remember it from my youth as well. My version of this when I was in college writing fiction was to pull out the brand-new Thesaurus feature in the word processing software and really try to show off. Because big words equals fancy writing, doesn’t it?!
Well, no. So it’s another one of those rites of passage that I have to be patient with. But now I feel better equipped to articulate what I see happening too often. Stupid young people showing off by using too many flashbacks! ;)
As Steven Soderbergh said, “Confusing people doesn’t make you an artist.”
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?!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
