The Art of Jump-Scares

As horror enthusiasts, we all know how to spot an upcoming jumpscare. One horribly unpleasant tone increasing in volume, eerie violin music fading in, a first-person perspective from around a doorway, watching the character stare into seemingly empty darkness... We've learned to recognize the signs, and with such, we've learned to prepare ourselves for these scares. We've developed an immunity, in a sense. Jump-scares are something that attack our senses on a primal level, and thus we adapt on an equally primal level, learning and memorizing patterns.

However, there is a way to maintain the scare fraction of a jump-scare, although it's something you may not notice while watching a horror film. It's something the director intended for you to feel but not see, to experience but not just outright recognize. Not in your first viewing of the film, anyway. The key to a truly terrifying and shocking jump-scare is in the moments that lead up to it, the events that have led us down this path.

Now, that's a pretty broad statement. What do I mean by that? Suspense, the establishment of a setting, and the true sense of what a character is feeling are the backbone of a good jump-scare. With that in mind, that's why most quick scares featuring a random, sudden event from a source unrelated to the story yield very few screams. (An additional note here: I find that scares totally detached from the plot, placed into the story for the sole purpose of jolting you, are a sign of lazy writing.)

To elaborate further on this point, I'll give an example. Recently, I watched the horror short films "The Thing in The Apartment," and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of fear I felt by the conclusion of this delightfully frightful mini-series.

(Note: The content below contains spoilers on "The Thing in The Apartment." I've left a link at the bottom of the page if you'd like to give it a watch and return to me here.)

The part of this film that truly drew me in was a moment near the end of the first short, at which point we as an audience had a somewhat firm but still rightfully vague concept of this story's setting and antagonist. By this point in the film, we know that a woman, Lindsay, has been losing sleep over nightmares she's been having. Nightmares which she claims are not nightmares at all—she feels as if she's being watched at night, as if she isn't alone in her apartment despite being the only tenant. She hasn't actually seen anything, only had a looming and terrifying feeling that she isn't alone.

On the night this story takes place, she's fled her apartment after having felt that she had truly seen a silhouette of something lurking in her home. She calls a close friend, Sam, to come get her, having left to what looked like some sort of industrial building (maybe where she works?) and take her home.

Her friend is very skeptical of this entire situation, being certain that what she saw—and heard, as we come to find—was just an animal. Lindsay says that she had left her front door swung open, and that makes Sam even more certain the "animal" was probably gone by now.

I'll be honest—initially, I couldn't stand Sam. Much of her behavior frankly didn't make sense to me and seemed unnecessarily hostile, especially for a close friend trying to comfort her absolutely terrified friend. I can only assume, if Lindsay were to call someone in the dead of night in what ought to have been a panic attack, she would call someone she trusted. Someone she considered close. So, to me, the hostility of her good pal Sam seemed a bit out of place.

However, just wait. It seems the film itself is all too aware of how out of place her behavior is.

So, our only two characters so far make it back to the apartment complex. The woman—the rude one—decides she's going to go inside her friend's home and make sure all is safe so she can head back inside and everybody can get some more sleep.

Here is where I'm going to skip ahead a bit now that I've firmly established our environment. The friend of the terrified woman found the door open, just as she was told it would be, and doesn't spend long in the home before she hears something. Right off the bat, she looks pretty spooked, but that's fair regardless of how previously skeptical she'd been. Weird noises, animal or not, in an otherwise empty apartment will put most people on their toes. Hell, a pitch black apartment at night is bound to put you a little on-edge.

Soon enough, Sam sees the bedroom door is cracked open and all of the lights within are turned off. By this point of the film, she's turned on a lamp in the living room and clicked off her flashlight, however turns it back on upon entering Lindsay's bedroom.

Upon entering, something about this room seems to make her uncomfortable. Perhaps it's that she's invading someone else's personal space, perhaps it's the extent of how dark this room is... perhaps it's a combination of the two. Perhaps it's something different entirely. Either way, she's visibly tense and we as an audience are along with her for the ride. All of this talk of feeling watched but never seeing the culprit—it pops back into our mind at this moment.

Sam walks further into the room, and at long last, I can divulge to you one of my favorite jump-scares I've seen in a while. I myself jumped it again after watching the film a second time for this article. Something about the true sense of primal fear and paranoia it invokes is just fantastic. Sam stops near the center of the room, like she's heard something. She turns her head to the side to see if anything there and is immediately met with something, something that causes her—the skeptic—to gasp, but something we as an audience cannot see.

The camera angle changes and we come to find out it was simply her reflection staring back at her from a full-body mirror she didn't know was there. I personally loved this scare because it seems oh-so-close to how a real person would react. In this sort of situation, locking eyes with something, even if it was yourself, would come as quite a shock.

But... now, with the tension in the viewers at its highest point throughout the film, we notice she still looks terrified. Her eyes have gone to stare straight forward, wide with fear. She's made a noteworthy sound and feels even more paranoid that something is watching her.

Briefly, the camera switches over to look at Lindsay, who's been told to hang back in the car. She's been staring at her apartment window like a hawk, and after the mirror scare with Sam, she watches in terror as a lanky silhouette slinks past the window.

Now, we return to Sam. It's at this point, at long last, all of the suspense this film built up pays off. Behind her stands a monster, humanoid in nature but warped in a multitude of grotesque ways. Sam, as you might assume, is helpless. Cornered in a bedroom and paralyzed with fear, she's killed and eaten.

Now, earlier I mentioned that I didn't like how hostile Sam had been to her dear friend, then noted that the film was one step ahead of me with this behavior. What I was alluding to here was that horror films will often make an audience apathetic to a character who is going to die soon.

So, of all the horror films in the world, I've chosen this one to demonstrate a good, genuinely frightening jump-scare. Let this serve as a reminder of why random, out of place scares don't work; and why the power of suspense and toying with mankind's primal instincts shouldn't be taken for granted.

An ending note: "The Thing in The Apartment" left such a strong impression on me I found myself glancing over my shoulder every now and again while writing this. I live in a one bedroom apartment and I am alone.

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LINKS:

"The Thing in The Apartment," Dir. John Ross, 2015

Banner Image: Screencap from "The Thing in The Apartment." See link above.

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