Is There An Art To A Good Jump Scare?

gamerant.com:

When the camera hovers over a pitch-black room and the soundtrack has gone silent for a bit too long, most audiences already know what's coming. The sudden rush of a jump scare is a type of fear, and just like any other aspect of horror, it can be handled well or fumbled comically.

The most popular entry for the first jump scare to grace the silver screen comes in the 1942 horror film Cat People. Editor Mark Robson pioneered the technique by interrupting a tense and quiet scene with the sudden appearance of a noisy bus, later nicknamed the Lewton Bus after the film's producer. Lewton would use this technique, occasionally complete with the same bus, in multiple future films. The technique would increase sharply in popularity over the ensuing decades.

This Horror Sequel Has The Most Jump Scares of All Time

There were examples of the technique before Cat People, but the Lewton Bus was the blueprint from which most other horror films borrowed. The very first well-known example was the 1925 film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera. That early horror offering was silent, leaving the audio portion of the technique impossible. 16 years later, Orson Welles used a similar technique in his landmark cinematic opus Citizen Kane.

The film features a scene interrupted suddenly by a screeching cockatoo. Welles, known for his reticence to discuss his work in interviews, famously explained that the bird's jarring intrusion was only included to wake up the audience. Though different in many ways from the sudden screech of a ghost or the appearance of a killer over someone's shoulder, these examples represent early jump scares and remain highly praised to this day.

One extremely common jump scare format comes at the