The Eternal Jump Scare
The science behind why the jump scare is here to stay
It’s dark and SOMETHING is just behind the door. You creep up to it, baseball bat in hand, your friends huddle behind you, whispering to be careful. Your hand shakes as you reach out to open the rattling door. You throw it open and Aaaaah!!!!! It’s a cat!!
We’re going to take a little look at the science behind why cats are always scaring the crap out of us in movies.
A Little History
It’s hard to imagine a time before the modern jump scare, but it’s actually a fairly recent development.
In the days of silent movies, there were a few proto-jump scares like this scene in the silent 1925 movie Phantom of the Opera.
It’s close, but it’s not quite there yet. In fact sound plays such a large part in the startle reflex it’s almost impossible to imagine a true jump scare unless the organist was in on the gag. (More on that later)
To experience the first real modern jump scare we must look to 1942 and the film Cat People. Here we see a woman being stalked by an unknown menace following her down a dark shadowy street. She hears something. Footsteps. She stops and listens. It’s quiet but if she listens very carefully, yes, something is following her. As she reaches the end of the street and the end of her wits, a bus pulls up squealing it’s brakes and hissing loudly. The audience is straining so hard to hear the sound of the footsteps, it’s a true startle when the bus pulls up.
This technique was called “taking the Lewton Bus”. It was named after Val Lewton, the producer who created Cat People and many other horror movies as the head of the horror unit at RKO studios. This jump scare has another thing in common with many modern jump scares in that it’s a harmless object that arrives to deliver the startle.
Examples of jump scares even after that are few and far between. The next recorded jump scare was 18 years later in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. There are actually two decent minor jump scares in that movie. Here is the “Arbogast’s death” scare.
Many consider the last scene of Stephen King’s film adaptation of Carrie (1976) to be the first real modern jump scare. Pretty tame by today’s standards but shocking at the time.
It became its own special kind of jump scare called the “final scare” imitated in many many movies since such as the end of the 1980 horror classic Friday the 13th.
The Startle Response
The “Startle Response” or “Startle Reflex” is a natural, involuntary reaction to a sudden stimulus designed to protect the body from attack. It starts in milliseconds and begins at the head and goes down, clenching our jaws, closing our eyes, shrugging our shoulders, tightening our abdominals, and bending our legs. It all takes place in under a second. It is considered innate and even babies have startle reflexes. Even though it is a reflex, it can be affected by a person’s emotions and psychology. Some people are more jumpy than others and we’re all more jumpy in certain circumstances. Like when watching a horror movie!
The startle response in mammals has been intensively studied and what they have found will be of very little surprise to the modern horror fan.
It has to be loud
Good results for rats start at around 90–95db (about the loudness of a motorcycle or ATV) and the startle increases as the decibels go up. No matter what the species if the sound is too quite it doesn’t startle. Louder is always more startling (up to a point).
It has to be sudden
If there is more than a few millisecond of volume rise up to the startle threshold there is no startle no matter how loud you get. A gunshot, a trashcan knocking over, or a cat screeching does the trick!
You get used to it
If there are too many shocks given to the mouse, the mouse gets used to it and isn’t startled any more. It’s called habituation. There are only so many times in a row it can work! Is it the same for jump scares? Though there are ways of dehabituating the startles to get them back.
Is the number of jump scares increasing?
It’s a common lament that modern movies rely too much on jump scares, packing their running times with hard-wired reflex-inducing startles. But as we see above, there has to be a limit. The effect often goes from scary to annoying to not much of anything. So is it true? Are there more and more jump scares in movies?
According to Where’s The Jump the number of jump scares per movie peaked in the 1980’s during the slasher movie craze. This makes sense considering Psycho’s influence in both the jump scare and the slasher genre.
After the eighties the numbers never really went up or back down again, staying fairly even at an average of about 10 jump scares per movie. That being said there are plenty of popular movies with over 20 (minor and major) jump scares in them, but not really more than that. Although the evidence isn’t conclusive, it seems that horror movies have found their sweet spot and haven’t really increased in the last 30 years.
What’s with the cats?
A steady diet of hard-core shocks is not as scary as unpredictable and variable shocks of different intensities.
In studies it was found that people were much more startled and anxious if both the timing and intensity of shocks administered were random. This means that participants who were shocked with LOWER intensity shocks, sometimes ½ the intensity, were MORE anxious and had greater startle responses.
This translates nicely to the jump scare. A cat one time, an alien predator the next. Maybe you would think it would be scarier for it to always be something terrifying, but no. That cats have a purpose. The cats and hissing busses create the necessary uncertainty required for our jumpiness to max itself out.
In fact uncertainty is so uncomfortable that it’s been shown that people would rather be given an electric shock to avoid it. If given the choice, of being shocked right now or maybe be shocked in the future. Some people will even opt for a shock of increased voltage if they can get it over with immediately.
The reason why the jump scare is here to stay
Yes, the jump scare is cheap. It’s a biological hard-wired response and no matter how unafraid you are, you’ll jump at a loud enough noise. It can be fun, but it can also be as annoying as being a rat shocked over and over again in a cage.
But here’s why we’re stuck with it. It’s not the jump scare that is the goal.
The shock creates a sense of dread. The jolt is fun, but it’s the dread that comes after that really drives the use of jump scares. A sense of apprehension.
If directors can get the audience’s anxiety and uncertainty high enough this effects how they experience the rest of the movie. This dread, and the act of waiting for the next shock, takes an agonizing toll.
To put it another way, the jump scares turn us into lab rats!
Now we are not just sympathizing with the characters, we ARE a character afraid of getting more shocks! When the babysitter looks down into the dark basement after the lightbulb just POPPED and went out, we become apprehensive. Not just for the babysitter, but for ourselves!
We fill that dark basement with every fear we’ve got, trying to anticipate what we’ll encounter, in order to get rid of our sense of uncertainty. By trying to alleviate the unpredictability we feel that is so uncomfortable, we create actual fear. By populating the darkness with scenario after scenario of what horrible terrible thing could happen, we have turned a jump scare into fear and this is the real pay-off.
We are making the movie scarier by trying to prepare ourselves for, and anticipate, the next shock. We’ve now edited our worst fears into the movie.
We become fearful of the character going down there, partly because we don’t want any more shocks! We’re screaming at the screen “Don’t go down there! Don’t!!!”
The closer we get to an unpleasant sensation, the more apprehensive we get. The more apprehension, the more fear, and then, the larger the startle when the cat jumps out!
Startle responses during fearful movies are significantly larger than startle responses shown during pleasurable movies. Audiences startle more when they’re already scared, and they’re going to get scared from being startled!
It’s chocolate and peanut butter. They just go together.
Yes, it’s a trick and essentially turns audiences into lab rats, but now that jump scares are here, I think it’s safe to say, they’re here to stay.
