Hitchcock & Horror
Horror Movie Hot Take: Jump scares ARE Scary.
Jump scares are SCARY! They scare me. How could they not? A sudden frightening image, a flash of light and a loud blast from the speakers will make me jump. Mostly because I am scared.
Any jumpscare in any movie can elicit this response from the audience. They may not be nuanced, but they are effective.
There are many fans of the horror genre who poo poo them as cheap. I used to fall into this camp. I took up the rallying cry that, “Jump scares aren’t actually scary.” I touted that REAL horror movies earn their scares by crafting character moments through narrative.
I would like to stand before you today and disagree with myself. I was off base. My mistake was treating jump scares and intimate, character-driven horror as if they were the same and then claiming one was better than the other.
You see, one is called shock, the other is called dread & both of them serve the same end - crafting a memorable story. I learned this neuance from Alfred Hitchcock.
You can hear him articulate this in his own words here or you can read his quote below.
“Four people sitting at a round table, talking about baseball, or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? 10 seconds of shock.
Now take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under the table and will go off in five minutes. Now the whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you’ve given them that information. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital because they’re (the audience) saying to you, “Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball there’s a bomb under the table!” You’ve got the audience working.”
Hitchcock gave me the vocabulary to articulate why jump scares felt cheap at times and he helped me see that they have a valuable place in storytelling.
There are moments where the audience needs to feel shock. There are others where they need to feel dread. Shock & dread are nothing more that two different implements in a storyteller’s tool kit.
There have been some amazing jump scares in the history of cinema. Iconic moments like, Bruce jumping on to the boat in Jaws, the sudden lunge of the Xenomorph out of the darkness of The Nostromo’s air vents in Alien is another classic, and then there’s my favorite - the demon hands playing the Clap! Clap! game in The Conjuring. In each of these moments, the story needed shock. Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott & James Wan respectively delivered it in spades.
Shock can be powerful. Shock can be memorable. But Dread…
Dread gets to you. As Hitchcock points out, dread invites the audience into a sort of collaboration. They are working as the scene unfolds and they will drink it down to it’s dregs. Every word of the dull dull conversation is vital once you know there is a bomb under the table.
The opening sequence of Breaking Bad Season 2 instantly comes to mind. The disturbing image of that pink teddy bear, luridly floating in Walt’s pool kicked the new arc off with a sinking feeling. As more footage of this toy is revealed through out the season, the sense of peril felt for The Whites ratchets higher and higher and higher.
Ominous foreshadowing has been used in many stories to build tension. But dude, for my money? There is no living creator who does this to a greater effect than Eisner Award-winning author & artist Becky Cloonan. Her work lives in my mind, rent free, in the same section of my hippocampus that houses the words, “creeping dread.” In her trilogy of short stories, By Chance Or Providence, Cloonan weaves a tapestry depicting doomed lovers, orphaned squires, undead knights and malevolent fae.
She opens the book with these iconic lines:
We see the first story’s protagonist, The Hunter, wandering naked through the woods. We watch as he tears a bird apart with his teeth and then, the page turn reveals him clothed, armored and without a hint of his disheveled state.
How was he cursed? Why was he cursed?
We read on, needing the answer, knowing he is doomed.
My first attempt to create an atmosphere of dread was in my 2022 Inktober project, The Devil’s Left Hand. The premise of the story was simple: If you become a monster to defeat a monster, Evil is Triumphant.
I didn’t want the audience to be surprised by my protagonist’s slide into corruption. I was not going for shock. I wanted them to know he was dealing with the devil from the moment he found the midnight crossroads. It was my hope and intention to contrast the story’s ominous title and design with the sweetness & simplicity of the its opening.
Did I pull it off? Only you can say! Read the entire story here and tell me what you think! My inbox is always open.
I’ll catch ya next month on the 3rd,
JT⚡
