FEATURE: On Jump-Scares and The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012)

While Steven Spielberg was editing Jaws, he discovered that he could create a big scare in the middle of the film.  You see, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) is exploring a sunken boat, and he pulls a large shark tooth (one the size of a shot glass) from the broken hull.  This is intimidating enough, and Hooper merely being in the water induces goosebumps.  But Spielberg decided to put a dead man in the hull and give the audience a jostle (skip to 4:35).  However, he didn't just reveal the corpse.  He added a stinger - a bit of music that shrieks and announces the in-camera scare.  He later noted that when he showed this re-cut film to audiences, they shrieked at the corpse in the water...and shrieked less the first time Brody sees the shark.

It wasn't because the shark didn't scare them.  It was because, after getting a jump-scare, the audience knew they couldn't trust Spielberg.  They put up their defenses.

Spielberg's decision was most likely influenced by the strings used in suspense films like Psycho and Wait Until Dark.  The former had shrieking violins accompany the sudden murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh).  Hitchcock managed to keep this technique from feeling cheap by threading composer Bernard Herrmann's strings throughout the film, and by keeping the strings after the initial shock, so the music becomes a part of the assault.


Wait Until Dark, a fantastic suspense film, features a shocking moment late in the picture, with Harry Roat (Alan Arkin) leaping after blind heroine Susy (Audrey Hepburn).  The moment successfully shocks, but because it's isolated, and because the violins quickly give way to danger-music, it's a little less justifiable.  The music functions as an islanded "gotcha" moment instead of a larger leitmotif.

However, Wait Until Dark heroically builds to that moment, which comes towards the very end of the film - at the moment of highest possible dramatic impact.  The preceding ninety minutes of suspense allows that scene to function as a moment of culmination.  The final confrontation of opposing characters.  While the stylistic choice to make the moment so damn loud can be questioned, what's undeniable is that the music emphasizes something that is worth emphasizing.

The key difference here - the difference that separates Jaws from Psycho and Wait Until Dark - is that its shock moment doesn't actually arrive with any danger.  It's a gag.  There is no concurrent attack from the villain, or even the notion that the shark is nearby.  There's a possibility, but Hooper immediately swims to the surface, takes off his suit and recuperates.  Given that this is Spielberg, the scene is still expertly handled.  As good a shock as a film can have.  But what are we watching here?

What we're watching is the gradual loss of dramatic payoff.  The birth of the jump-scare.  In which the music and staging assures us that something is about to happen, right before absolutely nothing happens.

Granted, Spielberg's gag with the head isn't quite there yet.  A corpse is a corpse.  A worthwhile dramatic reveal.  And the infamous "bigger boat" scene works so well because there's nothing to herald the shark's arrival.  Suddenly, without warning, without music, it's there.  The scenes listed so far are meant to provide context, an understanding of how filmmakers can produce scares through music and story turns.  Psycho offers score and concrete stakes.  Wait Until Dark offers a stinger and concrete stakes.  Jaws offers a stinger and implied stakes.

At a certain point, though, filmmakers went from using music stingers to accompany fearful elements...to using music stingers on their own.  This isn't limited to bad filmmakers (any given Friday the 13th director).  James Cameron made sure that a cocooned colonist in Aliens opened her eyes in tandem with shrieking violins.  Why do violins announce her eyes?  Because the audience is more likely to jump that way.  That doesn't mean that the filmmaker's successfully produced a scary moment.  It only means that the audience has normal cognitive hearing.

If anything, music stingers indicate that little effort has been made to build atmosphere.  The famous example of this cheap trick is the "cat-scare," in which spring-loaded cats suddenly jump into frame, hiss on cue, and exit.  If you've seen movies, you've seen a cat-scare before.  For an example (and parody), watch a takedown on the TV show Community, when hero Jeff Winger falls victim to four cat-scares in a row.  "What about the zombies?" "Backburner, Troy, this cat has to be dealt with!"

Look, shock moments in horror can be welcome.  Who can forget the ending of Carrie, or the attic scene in The Exorcist?  Or the sudden arrival of the bus in Cat People?  But remember that those moments are rare to those films, and that those moments don't supplant the effect of the story; they augment.  Carrie's ending is a moment of culmination and carries grim subtext (that Susan will be haunted forever).  The attic scene in The Exorcist offers no music, only the unexpected fwump of the candles exploding with flame - to wit, we hear what Chris McNeil would hear.  And the bus suddenly arriving in Tourneur's Cat People?  Well hey.  Busses hiss when they stop.

If those scenes work - and time is on their side - that means that there are two ways to "fix" a jump-scare and make it feel legitimate instead of tacky.  The filmmaker should remove either the falsity of the scene (when there's no accompanying threat) or the stinger (when the score blares).  If the movie suffers without those elements, it wasn't that good to begin with.  This is when I mention the Prom Night remake making a jump-scare out of someone walking into a lamp.

A lamp.

I bring all this up and mull it over because I saw The Woman in Black a week ago.  I was taken with the film's style and performances and overall mood.  Possibly the best-looking film of its kind since Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow.  But the film lays jump-scare after jump-scare in the first half of the film, and nothing scary follows the music stingers.  Violins shriek!  A faucet blasts murky water.  Violins shriek!  A crow flies through a window.  Violins shriek!  Nothing whatsoever.  The only sound that matters is the sound of an audience losing faith in a story's follow-through.

You see, horror first depends on unease, and unease comes from the unknown.  And fear of the unknown must be cultivated.  It can't be thrust on the audience.  Director James Watkins knows this on some level, because the second half of The Woman in Black is well-made suspense.  (Daniel Radcliffe) inspects room after room, with only candles to aid him, and the suspense mounts and mounts, and when loud noises slam against the audience's eardrums, or when strings pierce the silence, bad things actually happen.  What's occurring on-screen feels like strong horror-suspense, and it scared me a bit.  It would've scared me more if I hadn't put up my defenses.