Yeah, jumpscares *are* a cheap trick, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re inherently bad. When they’re overused they wear out their welcome quickly, but when a game deploys them sparingly and really puts in the work to build tension leading up to them they can be incredibly memorable.
*Iron Lung* was a recent game that really pulled this off. *Bonbon* was another indie game that has an incredibly good one in there. Don’t wanna go into any detail as they’re such short games.
One that always stuck with me from back in the day was a room in the hospital in *Silent Hill 4* where when you enter it the camera is facing Henry and the door he just came in through, but you can hear loud and erratic breathing dominating the space in front of you. When you finally work up the courage to inch forward, the camera flips to reveal that the room’s entire back wall is a massive version of your neighbor Eileen’s face with her eyes crossed staring down at you like a tiny morsel she’s about to devour. It’s like the video game equivalent of a Junji Ito manga where you flip the page to be greeted by a massive two page spread of some awful body horror image. Really love the way old fixed camera angle games could leverage the control they had on your perspective to unleash moments like that.
One recent game that comes to mind for having really bad jump scares that drowned out one really good one was *Alan Wake 2*. Many people criticize its bizarre and lazy jumpscares where it just shows the same fullscreen spooky image over and over again at seemingly random moments with a loud sound accompanying it, and does this so frequently that it’s way more annoying than scary. I think it’s especially sad, because one of the times they deploy this would have been so much more effective if the game hadn’t burnt you out on them. When you’re exploring the nursing home, a pretty safe environment with no real sense of danger or menace, you approach a woman looking out the window. She turns slightly and says “This will put a smile back on your face, my dear”, and just as you can register how strange this is a full screen scary image of her face appears with the loud jump scare noise and then she’s gone. On its own this would be so haunting and effective, but then the game goes on to reuse that same image and sound like 20 times in that chapter. Some restraint would make it work so much better.
First, hello Speed Weed!
Second, spot on with that variety comment. Relevance is also highly important. The classic Flying Naked Man from Amnesia customs is a great example of bad scares, not just because of repetition, but also why does it even matter?
But a better scare, such as Foxy sprinting down the hall, works because they make you take in a large amount of important info at once. You don’t just jump, your brain has to catch up and understand.
I agree. Jump scares have there place, but they need to be used once or twice in an hour long window. If they occur more than that, they start to annoy the player. Not necessarily a jump scare but something that always brought so much tension upon the player was the "Hunter Cutscene" from Resident Evil 1. They show the world through his eyes as he is running down the same pathway that you just came from. The horror music ques, he enters the roam you are residing in, and he screams. Amazing.
RE7 VR when Mia comes out of nowhere as her normal self while you’re looking for her. I jumped so hard it scared the shit out of my wife who was sitting near me doing something else.
I can say I’ve scared the crap out of myself on my own developed horror game too because I forgot I turned on a particular jump scare while testing. Got myself real good.
At least I know it works.
Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Alien Isolation, Outlast Trials, Amnesia The dark Descent, Escape The Backrooms, Phasmo, Demonologist, Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach (favourite of mine from the FNAF games), Penumbra: Black Plague (old but a classic), Blair Witch, Welcome To The Game, Welcome To the Game 2, Dead Signal.
The yeti jumpscare in Mundaun. Basically, the whole game is jumpscare free, relying mostly on the atmosphere, but there's this one instance where, right when you're about to go up a flight of stairs, a yeti grabs you from above. It scared the shit out of me because it was just so unexpected.
The old Resident Evil games had some good ones. Dogs jumping through the window, zombies grabbing you through the boarded up windows, Mr. X smashing through the walls, etc. More recently there was one in Tormented Souls that actually made me scream. You're walking back through a hallway in total darkness when a corpse bursts out of a locker just as you pass it.
People forget that even some of the most acclaimed horror films, games etc. utilise jump scares, sometimes liberally. It’s a release of tension, or even better, a primer to stop you from calibrating to the tension and getting too comfortable or feeling too safe.
Look at a film like Mulholland Drive, and the part everybody remembers the most. The Exorcist uses many of them, even “fakeouts” like a phone ringing. Believe it or not, even Silent Hill 2 has a good number of them.
I always like to use P.T. as a good example of how they are best utilised, that game has a handful of jump scares but even its most famous and terrifying one happens relatively early on and later it gives way to just nothing but tension. It’s not about the jump itself, it’s about setting you up to dread the next one, which, as is the case with P.T., may never come. If not for those early “primer” jump scares, you can “calibrate” to the atmosphere, music etc. in that hallway and start feeling safe.
Then you have stuff like Iron Lung or Squirrel Stapler where the jumpscare is almost like a “punchline”, and a final release of tension.
I think what people really mean is they don’t like when jumps are all there is. Just a big loud sound and maybe a scary face, out of nowhere to no effect other than to startle and with no bearing on the game/film as a whole.
the single Manhunt [jumpscare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v9_YEY1Cxo) - it's the only time in my life I've had a physical reaction because it was 100% not expected; the entire game the only obvious threat is the humans hunting you and you're on edge enough from that, so this random unrealistic jumpscare thrown in at a point nearing the end is so out of the blue and catches you so off-guard... I didn't rewatch the scene until just now because I thought it was a lot scarier than it actually is! it's so silly and I'm laughing at it now, the videogame equivalent of a ghost in a sheet popping out and saying "boo" but it haunted me for two decades
Is there a name for a jumpscare that's just *noticing* something rather than it really moving or becoming visible? Like if you just stared at a screenshot for three minutes you'd see it but it only just now became visible, or you jump when you look at it long enough to see it. Like a lot of of the pieces of people in the SOMA monsters. Those might be my favorite.
The bathtub scene in *Eternal Darkness* on Gamecube. First time I ever screamed out loud because of a game.
I recently replayed Eternal Darkness for the first time since about 2010. I knew that jump scare was coming and it STILL made me jump out of my seat.
Yeah, jumpscares *are* a cheap trick, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re inherently bad. When they’re overused they wear out their welcome quickly, but when a game deploys them sparingly and really puts in the work to build tension leading up to them they can be incredibly memorable. *Iron Lung* was a recent game that really pulled this off. *Bonbon* was another indie game that has an incredibly good one in there. Don’t wanna go into any detail as they’re such short games. One that always stuck with me from back in the day was a room in the hospital in *Silent Hill 4* where when you enter it the camera is facing Henry and the door he just came in through, but you can hear loud and erratic breathing dominating the space in front of you. When you finally work up the courage to inch forward, the camera flips to reveal that the room’s entire back wall is a massive version of your neighbor Eileen’s face with her eyes crossed staring down at you like a tiny morsel she’s about to devour. It’s like the video game equivalent of a Junji Ito manga where you flip the page to be greeted by a massive two page spread of some awful body horror image. Really love the way old fixed camera angle games could leverage the control they had on your perspective to unleash moments like that. One recent game that comes to mind for having really bad jump scares that drowned out one really good one was *Alan Wake 2*. Many people criticize its bizarre and lazy jumpscares where it just shows the same fullscreen spooky image over and over again at seemingly random moments with a loud sound accompanying it, and does this so frequently that it’s way more annoying than scary. I think it’s especially sad, because one of the times they deploy this would have been so much more effective if the game hadn’t burnt you out on them. When you’re exploring the nursing home, a pretty safe environment with no real sense of danger or menace, you approach a woman looking out the window. She turns slightly and says “This will put a smile back on your face, my dear”, and just as you can register how strange this is a full screen scary image of her face appears with the loud jump scare noise and then she’s gone. On its own this would be so haunting and effective, but then the game goes on to reuse that same image and sound like 20 times in that chapter. Some restraint would make it work so much better.
First, hello Speed Weed! Second, spot on with that variety comment. Relevance is also highly important. The classic Flying Naked Man from Amnesia customs is a great example of bad scares, not just because of repetition, but also why does it even matter? But a better scare, such as Foxy sprinting down the hall, works because they make you take in a large amount of important info at once. You don’t just jump, your brain has to catch up and understand.
I agree. Jump scares have there place, but they need to be used once or twice in an hour long window. If they occur more than that, they start to annoy the player. Not necessarily a jump scare but something that always brought so much tension upon the player was the "Hunter Cutscene" from Resident Evil 1. They show the world through his eyes as he is running down the same pathway that you just came from. The horror music ques, he enters the roam you are residing in, and he screams. Amazing.
RE7 VR when Mia comes out of nowhere as her normal self while you’re looking for her. I jumped so hard it scared the shit out of my wife who was sitting near me doing something else. I can say I’ve scared the crap out of myself on my own developed horror game too because I forgot I turned on a particular jump scare while testing. Got myself real good. At least I know it works.
Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Alien Isolation, Outlast Trials, Amnesia The dark Descent, Escape The Backrooms, Phasmo, Demonologist, Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach (favourite of mine from the FNAF games), Penumbra: Black Plague (old but a classic), Blair Witch, Welcome To The Game, Welcome To the Game 2, Dead Signal.
The yeti jumpscare in Mundaun. Basically, the whole game is jumpscare free, relying mostly on the atmosphere, but there's this one instance where, right when you're about to go up a flight of stairs, a yeti grabs you from above. It scared the shit out of me because it was just so unexpected.
The old Resident Evil games had some good ones. Dogs jumping through the window, zombies grabbing you through the boarded up windows, Mr. X smashing through the walls, etc. More recently there was one in Tormented Souls that actually made me scream. You're walking back through a hallway in total darkness when a corpse bursts out of a locker just as you pass it.
Madison had a ton of really good jumpscares!
People forget that even some of the most acclaimed horror films, games etc. utilise jump scares, sometimes liberally. It’s a release of tension, or even better, a primer to stop you from calibrating to the tension and getting too comfortable or feeling too safe. Look at a film like Mulholland Drive, and the part everybody remembers the most. The Exorcist uses many of them, even “fakeouts” like a phone ringing. Believe it or not, even Silent Hill 2 has a good number of them. I always like to use P.T. as a good example of how they are best utilised, that game has a handful of jump scares but even its most famous and terrifying one happens relatively early on and later it gives way to just nothing but tension. It’s not about the jump itself, it’s about setting you up to dread the next one, which, as is the case with P.T., may never come. If not for those early “primer” jump scares, you can “calibrate” to the atmosphere, music etc. in that hallway and start feeling safe. Then you have stuff like Iron Lung or Squirrel Stapler where the jumpscare is almost like a “punchline”, and a final release of tension. I think what people really mean is they don’t like when jumps are all there is. Just a big loud sound and maybe a scary face, out of nowhere to no effect other than to startle and with no bearing on the game/film as a whole.
I think the quality of the scare is what makes the difference. That’s a small novel in itself so I’ll leave it at that lol.
the single Manhunt [jumpscare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v9_YEY1Cxo) - it's the only time in my life I've had a physical reaction because it was 100% not expected; the entire game the only obvious threat is the humans hunting you and you're on edge enough from that, so this random unrealistic jumpscare thrown in at a point nearing the end is so out of the blue and catches you so off-guard... I didn't rewatch the scene until just now because I thought it was a lot scarier than it actually is! it's so silly and I'm laughing at it now, the videogame equivalent of a ghost in a sheet popping out and saying "boo" but it haunted me for two decades
Alan Wake 2 has a lot of jump scares, but I consider them to be very well earned.
Is there a name for a jumpscare that's just *noticing* something rather than it really moving or becoming visible? Like if you just stared at a screenshot for three minutes you'd see it but it only just now became visible, or you jump when you look at it long enough to see it. Like a lot of of the pieces of people in the SOMA monsters. Those might be my favorite.
The first one on "At Dead of Night" Don't want to give it away because the game is so good (I don't play, I saw it streamed on Twitch)
Such a good game, and that game is LOADED with good ones!
I agree. I have watched tons of horror games and that one remains my favorite.
I think the only good thing about Silent Hill: A Short Message was the jumpscare that's about half way through it.
Alan Wake 2 was full of them but felt very relevant to what was going on around you