OH, THE HORROR...SIGH.
What the hell has happened to horror cinema? I understand that film making is as much a business as it is an art and a science, but when we start treating movies as pure product, we kill off their original purpose which, in horror's case, was to SCARE THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF PEOPLE! If I pay ten bucks to see a horror film, I want to be frightened, and filling up ninety per cent of a film's run time with dumb jump scares is not going to firghten me. What it is going to do is piss me off. I can count on one hand the number of movies I've seen in the past fifteen years that have genuinely unnerved me, and that makes me sad. Yes, I look at the plethora of cliched fright fakers on offer today and I want to cry.
Allow me to illustrate my point by giving you two movie scenarios.
MOVIE A: A young woman is walking back to her college dorm late at night. She's attractive, reasonably fit, and she's all alone. The only soundtrack accompanying the scene is the sound of her heels lightly clipping the concrete, and the buzz of bass reverb coming from her earbuds as she, unwisely, listens to music on her iPod with the volume on high. She's smiling, oblivious to the dangers that may lay ahead, but we're not. We can hear the slight rustling of leaves as someone or something steps out from behind the sage brush hedge that borders the auditorium. We can hear breathing. We can see, when the point of view switches away for a moment, what our protagonist looks like from another point of view. We zoom in on our protagonist's neck, which looks like a mighty handy spot to stick a knife or a syringe, but then our protagonist turns right and veers off the path into her building, closing the door on her would be attacker and leaving us, the audience, with an unresolved tension that just keeps on building until something does eventually happen and we unwittingly shower our fellow cinema goers with popcorn and Coke. The movie only runs for ninety minutes in the cinema, but it will play inside our heads for years to come whenever we find ourselves alone.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is terror.
Want to know what ISN'T?
MOVIE B: Another young woman is walking back to her dorm late at night. She's just as attractive and fit, and she's also all alone. There's no ambient music here, either, just the redundant screech and thwack of whatever that stuff is that can't legally be called music droning away inside her head. She too is completely oblivious to whatever might be going on around her, and we worry for her as whoever or whatever comes out of hiding and heads straight for her, zeroing in on the back of her neck.
SCRATCH! MEOW! SCREAM!
Oh, phew! It's just the janitor's creepy tom cat!
Goodbye tension, hello tedium! Jump scares do exactly what the name suggests: they scare you very briefly by making you jump six feet in the air. Know what else they do? Completely rid viewers of all of their built up tension so that with each successive jump scare, and make no mistake a hundred more will happen, the audience becomes more and more desensitized so that, by the time the genuine terror kicks in, your audience is, if anything, a little disappointed.
FUCK JUMP SCARES.
One of these days, I'm going to have that printed onto a t shirt.
