The Power of the Jump Scare and the "Unseen Thing"

One of the most common staples in horror films is the jump scare. This technique involves having a character enter a threatening situation, then get lulled into a false sense of safety, and then… bam! A sudden and oft-monstrous attacker comes at them, typically accompanied by a jarring sound effect. A classic example is in the movie Psycho. Detective Arbogast slowly walks into the big old house on the hill, climbs a flight of empty stairs, and then… out of a side room comes Mother with a huge knife! She hacks his face and sends him sprawling to his death.

The power of the jump scare rests in a lull shattered by the suddenness and creativity of the shock. Alfred Hitchcock knew what he was doing.

Even more than the jolt, though, there is something psychologically rudimentary in the jump scare. This relates to what we may call the "Unseen Thing."

The Unseen Thing is the monster that we know is out there, but that we can’t locate.

To understand this threat, we must begin with the fact that monsters and monstrous people are the bread and butter of the horror genre. Killers with masks and/or mutilated faces, ghosts with ghoulish smiles or empty eye sockets, creatures with long claws or sharp teeth, among legions of other creeps, cinematically emphasize the difference between malign actors and innocent victims. The monstrous appearance is terrifying. And effective directors know how to hide it until the right moment.

There must be a buildup. A period of normalcy, of filling out character backstory. This buildup leads inevitably to the reveal. The reveal is when we finally get a look at the monster. Some of the best reveals, in my view, are when the girl pulls the mask from Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, when Large Marge shows her true self to Pee-wee Herman in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and when the witch bursts out of the darkened kitchen in It: Chapter Two. But there are literally thousands of examples to choose from.

When the reveal happens suddenly and shockingly, it taps a deep fear in us. This is the terror of sensing the threat but not being able to see it—and then suddenly seeing it, in all its gruesome glory.

The fear of the Unseen Thing is a reason why darkness is so central to horror films. Psychologists theorize that fear of the dark, or nyctophobia, may be evolutionary. At night, predators can creep up and kill us more easily. Our more paranoid ancestors might have survived whereas their more complacent peers rested and thus got eaten.

Horror films take us into the dark, allowing us to experience predatory threats. In horror movies, we get to cathartically face down Unseen Things via spunky protagonists. These movies allow us to safely access and overcome our primal fears of predation.

In real life, Unseen Things aren’t monsters. We all worry about them, though. They are the bad things that come creeping up unexpectedly: financial disasters, grave diseases, serious accidents. These are threats that can suddenly, shockingly, upend our lives. These threats “jump” out when least expected. Often, they arrive when we, like detective Arbogast, think there’s nothing too terrible up around the corner.

But unlike real life, we know the jump scares in horror movies are coming. We probably even know what the monster looks like, from the commercials and movie posters. In the latest Quiet Place movie, for instance, there are multiple effective jump scares, of a creature that we’ve seen already in two earlier films. The movie is doing quite well.

When the Unseen Thing finally leaps into view, we jump… and then we smile. Because now, this particular threat is no longer Unseen. And through the hero, we can deal with it. The jump thus becomes therapeutic. This is the emotional payoff. It’s a payoff rooted in our desire for security in an insecure world.