The jump scare is one of the most infamous tools in the horror toolbox, and a lot of that comes from how fleeting it is. There is a slight disparity among people as to what classifies as scary, once put rather well by Mike Stoklasa of Red Letter Media as "like humor", where you can feel it but not exactly explain it. A jump scare, by its very form and being, isn't really scary. There are no lingering effects, no weight left in the back of your mind weighing you down - just a mounting tension, a quick startle, and then it is over. It is like the junk food equivalent to horror, fleeting in how it satisfies, and shallow in what is satisfied. Despite or because of this, the jump scare has been a popular staple of horror films and, more recently in the last half decade, horror video games, but that isn't always a bad thing.
The jump scare in film has been around since sound was employed in film, but it may be at its most condensed with Paranormal Activity. Paranormal Activity is a found footage film about a young California couple filming the odd happenings in their new house in San Diego. Found footage had been around for a long time, showing up as cult films like Cannibal Holocaust and The Last Broadcast before getting mainstream success with the surprisingly good The Blair Witch Project. By 2009, when Paranormal Activity was released, the found footage genre had just about worn itself out, even getting a rather terrible George Romero rendition with Diary of the Dead. There were some notable entries, such as the Spanish language film REC, but otherwise the genre seemed to have petered out. Paranormal Activity had a couple of things going for it that made it into a blockbuster success. Notably, the film takes place in a borderline immersion breaking wealthy house, the house of director Oren Peli. Oren Peli made the movie for something around $15,000, an insanely low budget even for horror movie standards. The film used mostly practical effects (with one CGI edit once it was picked up by Paramount Studios) and each of the actors were paid a measly $500 for their performances (after the film's success, they were able to renegotiate their contracts and get paid more). The film's low budget made it easy to produce independently, and made it a relatively low risk venture for Paramount Pictures to acquire. Paramount, however, structured an innovative marketing campaign around the film. Starting with your basics straight out of The Blair Witch Project handbook, they marketed it as a real event that was too scary to properly show in the trailer (code for "nothing really happens in this movie", for your information). Then, they followed up by asking audiences to go to a website and "demand" the film be shown in their area, giving it immediate audience participation while gathering information of where the film may be most successful. The film gained a rather large word of mouth - the most I can think of in a horror film since The Ring at the time, or perhaps Saw - and suddenly Paramount had a big hit on their hands.
The success of the film, then, has little to nothing to do with the film's actual quality, but the film still garnered a myriad of sequels. I know quite a few people who really like the series, but no one really loves it. Paranormal Activity resembles an amusement park ride more than it does a film, and I am far from the first person to say so. Paranormal Activity's plot is literally what you get from the poster: an hour and a half of home footage with some scary stuff happening at night. The characters are a mixed bag overall, with the woman Katie being easily empathized with (and a rather good performance from the actress who plays her, Katie Featherston), and the character Micah being wholly reprehensible in his disregard for his girlfriend's wishes or safety. The story of these two trying to capture what is going on is incredibly forgettable, and services the film virtually not at all. What the film's draw becomes, then, is in the jump scares.
What is particularly odd about Paranormal Activity is that its jump scares are aggressively telegraphed. Night falls, we see our protagonists sleep, time fast forwards and then slows back down to normal speed whenever an event is about to take place. The "scary parts" are openly telegraphed, letting the audience prepare for them and react whenever the film tells them to, the horror equivalent of a giant sign on the set of a sit-com saying "LAUGH". It's somewhat bizarre that this works for anyone, since it feels counteractive to how horror is supposed to work. Horror is meant to surprise, to create discomfort and to call upon some insecurity of mortality or control. Even though my opinion of The Ring was rather mixed, at the very least that film knew that to be effective was to create a feeling that its protagonists were in over their heads, that trauma doesn't leave but returns over and over again. In Paranormal Activity, (mild spoilers here) there is no reason in the characters or place for this to be happening. Simply put, there is a demon that has decided to follow Katie, but there is no particular reason for it. That isn't to say this concept cannot work, as it was rather successful in The Strangers, but that film was about the meaninglessness of violence. There were people acting as inhuman as could be imagined. The horror came from how normalcy was exploitable, how simply being home in a place that was comfortable was a risk if someone so chose to invade your safety. Paranormal Activity is essentially just "scary, unexplained things can happen and there is no reason for it", which is a stretch at the best of times because it requires us to also believe in demons. Even in films with demons, such as The Exorcist, the horror isn't just in the little girl being possessed, but in our understanding of what this girl is capable of being challenged, and we are forced to empathize with the casualties of this poor girl's condition. The horror isn't the lone possession, but the entire community of horror and grief around it.
Paranormal Activity has one goal in mind, and that is to make you jump when it tells you to. It is relatively effective at this. Jump scares themselves aren't all bad, because generally they are lead in with tension, and tension is a rewarding emotion when properly played out. There are moments in Paranormal Activity that are effective for me, such as Katie standing up for hours on end, the demon's foot prints walking up to the bed, and the footsteps heard off camera, and the reason those are effective is because they either depict unnatural behavior or they imply a presence we cannot totally perceive. That difficulty on my part to comprehend the information given to me is scary, but the greater context of the film doesn't compliment this type of horror. It abandons it with a shrug and a "that was creepy, huh?" before moving on to the next set piece. The most impressive part of Paranormal Activity is in the low budget and the general restraint from director Oren Peli. He has at least some sense of horror build up, but zero talent when it comes to plot and characters (which, it should be noted, the performances were improvised, so what positives can be taken from Katie's performance do not reflect on him much outside of editing). I'm probably among the minority of film snobs on this point, but I think there was a good movie that could have been made using this basic set up. The characters, given tweaks here and there with the proper set up for why this is happening as some modern consequence, could have been effective, and the horror could have been executed with some variation and we would have had something at least a decent surprise, rather than a hyped up disappointment.
Paranormal Activity is jump scares for their own sake, and games do this too. One of the games that largely gets this sort of disregard is Five Nights at Freddy's. In Freddy's, you play as a newly hired guard of an old Chuck E. Cheese type children's restaurant. Instead of guarding the place from burglars, however, you are instead hired to keep tabs on the animatronic band the place is named for. Their AI, it turns out, gets a little "quirky" at night and throughout the week as you get closer to the weekend. They begin to roam around the restaurant, and your job is to watch them on the cameras and close the doors to the guard office if they come too close, lest they kill you. The reasons for everything given in game are a tad ridiculous, but mechanically they work rather well. The animatronics want to kill you because they think you are an exoskeleton without a suit, and, since that is forbidden so as not to traumatize children with unclothed animatronics on the floor, they will violently stuff you into a costume, killing you. The reason the doors need to be closed manually and don't remain closed is because they draw from your limited power supply, as does checking the cameras, meaning you have to be resourceful with your tools. What this creates is a one-man game of chicken, where you have to keep away from checking your cameras and closing your doors as long as you can manage, knowing full well the animatronics are more active when you aren't looking. There is even one animatronic that will get progressively more aggressive if you do not keep tabs on him, to the point where he will rush the office if he gets out of his room at all, rather than the slow maneuvering towards you the others do. The tension is in resource management, with the fail state being, obviously, a jump scare from one of the animatronics.
Five Night at Freddy's gets a lot of flak for being a simple viral "jump scare" game meant for YouTubers and streamers to play and scream at for their young audience's enjoyment. And, largely, that was why the game was so successful. But, in what may be a surprising twist from pretentious game critic me who loves small art games no one plays, I actually like Five Nights at Freddy's. I find it near unbearable to play (though I have beaten the game), but that is because I personally don't like jump scares. What I do like, however, is resource management, dreaded consequences, and lots of tension, and Freddy's has that in spades. A jump scare as a punishment is perhaps the best use for the technique, as it gives you a sense of stakes rarely actually found in video games. Most of the time, a horror game is only scary until you die, in which you realize what is in store for you if you fail, and tension falls away. With Freddy's, I fucking hate being jump scared if the game can manage it (movies hardly ever do), and Freddy's generally does. The stakes are there, no matter how artificial they are. The game creates an atmosphere where I am fighting my most neurotic wants, making me hold off from the relative safety of checking all of the cameras and keeping tabs on everyone in case I need to keep the door shut for an extended period of time. The game isn't particularly difficult, all things told, but it does create a level of tension that makes its relatively easy difficulty much more difficult. The problem is how I react to the situation, not in how the game expresses its difficulty, which is a somewhat refreshing take on how hard a game is. And, as the cherry on top, making the escape key close the entire game instead of pause is a bit of brilliance.
Jump scares, like any beloved or despised tool in a piece of media, are just that: a tool. They can be used well, used poorly, and it is about what mechanical or emotional ideas we can build with it that makes it worthwhile or annoying. Quality isn't in the parts as much as the execution of those parts. Creating a work of art or even just an enjoyable, relatively quality piece of media doesn't come down to just innovation or outlandish pieces, but rather in a deliberate and effective execution. That's what the best of the best always have. It is a tempered restraint and understanding of what a particular piece needs, not an opportunity to show off. Five Nights at Freddy's is no masterpiece, but it is effective where Paranormal Activity fails.
Paranormal Activity:
5.0
Five Nights At Freddy's:
7.0
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