KATIE MARIE

Boo!

Good day, I hope you are well my friend.

Today I am writing to you about one of the most tedious horror tropes, in my opinion, that is the jump scare.

The jump scare is there to frighten the audience, except that it isn’t, in my opinion, as there’s a difference between being afraid, the bone deep terror of impending doom, the slow growth of internalised dread, the vibrant disgust of body horror and the lazy startle of the jump scare.

Jump scare literally makes an audience jump.

Now, I’m not totally against them, a jump scare can work as a good pay off, if you build tension, make your characters vulnerable, work with the environment, use all the senses and keep building that tension then have a jump scare at the end of it, then it can work really well.

The surprise has to be earned for it to be effective.

Fake out

Which leads me on nicely to the jump scare used as a fake out, this is a type of jump scare that irritates the hell out of me. It’s been overdone to become almost expected. Half the time if I can feel the tension building I can sense when it’s going to be a fake out jump scare. They are easy to spot if you know what to look for. Usually the tension raise will be abrupt and short lived, the context will be wrong and the entire episode will be unearned and frustrating.

So what makes a good one?

As I said above for a jump scare to work it has to be earned, there has to be a proper set up, the audience, reader, player etc has to have an expectation, one of security that is suddenly disputed, or one of dread that builds and is paid off. The context must be right for the scare to work, having one out of context will definatly make people jump but they will lead to frustration.