How to Build a Jump Scare in Modern Horror Movies

In Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 film Cat People, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) walks home alone at night. She is being stalked by Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), the wife of one of Alice’s co-workers and a descendant of the Cat People, an ancient tribe whose members turn into panthers when aroused. The sounds of their respective high heels clicking on the sidewalk echo off the stone of the surrounding buildings — Irena’s are a little higher pitched, more urgent than Alice’s, and thus a little offbeat. Alice realizes this, wondering if she’s being followed, and picks up speed, her head anxiously wagging backward. The silence in the air grows heavier between steps, a full minute having passed onscreen. Suddenly, Alice stops against a lamppost, the clicking suddenly ceasing. She’s bracing for a menacing growl to pierce the air when — bam! A hiss crashes through the frame. Except it’s not a cat. It’s the sound of an exhausted bus pulling up to the curb.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” the driver says. “Did you?” Alice desperately asks.

Although not the first jump scare in film history, the scene in Cat People is a famous early example and one that would influence the form going forward. It features zero elaborate creatures, deadly weapons, or special effects. The fright is instead built with invasive silence and its eventual release, cementing sounds — environmental, artificial, musical — as the most crucial building blocks for one of horror’s oldest, most surefire tricks. Mrs. Bates’s big moment in Psycho, the hospital-hallway scene in The Exorcist III, any of the “It’s right behind you!” reveals in The Conjuring series — they all take advantage of the mounting tension found in quiet or white noise and the painful satisfaction of a sudden, explosive sonic attack.

Die-hard horror fans can debate the efficacy of individual jump scares and whether the concept has become a hoary cliché, but few will outright deny the the heartbeat-skipping rush that comes from an auditory interruption done right. “There were so many jump-scare movies from, like, 2002 to 2014 that people got wise to them,” sound designer Tom Boykin (Black Friday, Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, Saw VI) admits. That time period included jump-scare treasure troves like the Final Destination sequels and the Paranormal Activity franchise as well as artier one-offs like It Follows and The Babadook. “Now the challenge is how do you make them fresh?” Boykin says. And it’s practically a provocation for Hollywood. “There’s still a lot of conversations about jump scares,” says director David Bruckner of his experience interacting with the studios who green-light contemporary horror films. “When they ask about how ‘scary’ something is, usually what they mean is, ‘I want that startle moment.’”

This fall, Vulture spoke to dozens of filmmakers, Foley artists, composers, sound designers, mixers, and editors across Hollywood about the construction of the classic jump scare in modern times. Even after all these years — as horror visuals have gotten bigger and the gore has gotten more real — they see in a jump scare exact yet ever-shifting audio formulas required to strike fear and jump to the challenge of pulling it all off.

If horror filmmakers agree on anything, it’s that a jump scare is only as good as the anticipatory calm that precedes it. The eventual attack of sound “doesn’t need to be super-loud,” sound designer David Barbee (The Boys, Fear of Rain, The Wicked Within) says. “It just needs to startle you. And that comes from the absolute quiet and the anticipation of not knowing when it’s going to end.”

However, silence isn’t just an absence of noise. Foley artist Marilee Yorston, whose early credits include Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, thinks less about the total suppression of sound and more about the exaggeration of the movements and objects that thrive in relative quiet. “If I have the opportunity for silence, I really heighten the clothing sounds, almost like you’re in a hyperreality,” she says. “You know when you’re afraid and your senses are just on fire? I try to makes things like the sound of someone’s sleeve coming up and the scratch of their beard really loud and kind of irritating.”

It’s the hyperreality of silence that makes an inevitable jump scare land, audio experts say, even when the audience is primed to expect it. As Aaron Moorhead, who alongside his creative partner, Justin Benson, has written and directed a number of horror features and helmed an episode of 2020’s The Twilight Zone, points out, “Almost every jump scare that is effective, even in movies heavy with jump scares, is always in a scene where you are expecting something to happen; it just doesn’t happen at exactly the time you’re expecting. So you are on pins and needles about it. I like to think of the blood test in The Thing. You know something is going to happen; you’re not like, Well, I guess they’re all going to be safe and walk on home, you know? It’s about increasing the sine wave of sound and expectation where it’s just running at a small rhythm of up and down. Then separate the peaks and valleys so that you’re at a down rhythm and you can swoop quickly back up.”

“I know I’ve started to see some directors and some filmmakers using this model,” Yorston adds, “and the silence is actually more terrifying than the sound.”

Filmmakers and auditory experts tend to develop a rhythm to their work in order to immerse audiences in their specific kind of dread — almost like a time signature that governs everything from the sounds of a villain’s introduction to the climactic moments in suspense. A jump scare can therefore hinge on an almost clockwork-esque design, with sound mixing and editing operating in exact synchrony to land the fright.

Building expectations so mathematically, artists and editors agree, allows for effective misdirection. “It’s got to be timed perfectly,” sound designer TJ Jacques (Untitled Horror Movie, The Walking Dead) explains. “If you have a bump or some sort of sound that gets the audience on their toes but it’s not a scary sound — they were expecting a jump scare and you gave them a little taste, and they go, Wait, what was that? — then you hit them with the jump scare. That sells it ten out of ten times.”

“It’s kind of like comedy, in that there’s a setup and a punch line,” says director Sophia Takal (Always Shine, Black Christmas). “The important elements are creating a sense in the audience that something is going to come and then subverting that expectation in some way so that when it does come, it’s unexpected. What’s really important is building the tension, releasing the tension a little bit, and then having the jump scare. It’s kind of a two-part thing.”

Boykin cites the comedian turned horror auteur Jordan Peele as particularly skilled at timing a misdirected jump scare: “Peele is really good at finding ways to get you to move around based on what you see. I love stuff where the jump scare is something like a toaster pop that isn’t really scary. People kind of wag their finger like, ‘Ahh, you got me on that one.’ Now you can do a real scare and they won’t be expecting it.”

If it sounds as if directors and audio artists are attempting to hypnotize their audience (cue the teacup scene in Get Out), it’s because they often are. Take Takal, who expertly deploys prolonged tension in her film Always Shine. In one pivotal scene, Beth (Caitlin FitzGerald) is on the phone ruthlessly complaining about her intense friend Anna (Mackenzie Davis), who unbeknownst to Beth is lurking just beyond her window. According to Takal, “I had the idea of shooting it all in one take and sort of showing where you might expect the other character would be and creating a negative space for her” — both in terms of visuals and sound. Beth paces back and forth on the porch, and the camera keeps landing on the nearby window, where we would expect to see Anna staring through, the earsplitting score swelling each time. Only she’s not there. “We do it for so long that at a certain point, audiences are like, Okay, she’s not there. By the time that she finally does show up, they’re back to being surprised. It took her such a long time to come that they were sort of lulled into a calm,” Takal says.

Takal relied on her composer’s and sound designers’ ability to follow her visual trick with artificial sounds, but the big Act One turn in the 2018 psychological horror film What Keeps You Alive lulls its audience into a similar calm using only organic noises. In a scene in which the protagonist, Jules (Brittany Allen), is abruptly pushed off a cliff by her wife, Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson), director Colin Minihan wanted to elicit the same reaction as a traditional jump scare while using zero unnatural sonic enhancement: “From a sound-design perspective, I actually don’t use any effects; we’re just enhancing the quiet of nature on the edge of the cliff. It’s disturbing enough in its own right. I really wanted it to feel as grounded and as realistic as possible — until the act of pushing her suddenly off the cliff and then just hearing a scream get further and further away.”

That enhancement is achieved through Foley art and sound mixing. “James Wan has said this before: Until the sound mix is done, the movie is not scary,” Moorhead says. He recalls a scene from The Endless in which a character finally reemerges from the bottom of a lake: “What I remember about that scene is it wasn’t about sound levels. It was the ambience of the sounds — they were the wrong ambiences. The wind through the trees was not a frightening wind through the trees; the lapping of the boat knocking against the water was the wrong lapping.”

“The lapping on the boat is so much of that scene,” observes Benson. “That gave it a rhythm.”

But enhancement can also be achieved through music. When scoring the swimming-pool scene in It Follows, composer Disasterpeace was faced with a unique problem: David Robert Mitchell’s film is one big escalation, the “It” figure drawing closer and closer to its prey over the course of 97 minutes. “It’s hard when you’re scoring a film chronologically and you’re basically trying to do the craziest thing every time there’s a scary sequence,” Disasterpeace explains. “By the end, it’s like, Well, I’m running out of headroom here! I don’t know how much crazier this can get!”

To make more space for himself, Disasterpeace played with scoring the action onscreen as if he were a sound designer. He pulled from a grab bag of sounds that could be reused throughout the story: bamboo percussion, a heartbeat. By the final jump scare, the music was amped to reflect both the closeness of the entity and the flurry of activity responding to it. “Things like the toaster being thrown into the water — the music underlines those in a very over-the-top way,” says Disasterpeace.

Figuring out how to surprise a well-trained audience is one thing, but the best filmmakers and sound experts are just as concerned with surprising themselves. “Honestly, as a filmmaker, it gets kind of boring to just guide the audience’s eye into dark shadows and then have the bogeyman jump out from the opposite corner of the frame,” says Minihan. “That can be very effective, especially in a theatrical setting, where the music just goes from zero to 100 when you see the villain come out of the shadow. But at least right now in my career, designing those types of jump scares is a little bit less appealing than trying to approach things from a different perspective.”

For directors like Bruckner, that means de-emphasizing the jump scare entirely and breaking down the rhythms he has built in prior works, which he did for his latest film, Hellraiser, a reboot of the long-running horror franchise about a puzzle box that summons violent extra-dimensional creatures. “We certainly didn’t want to get the audience into a rhythm with the jump scares of Hellraiser, because then I think you would be playing the wrong game with it,” says Bruckner. “Most of Hellraiser, in terms of rhythm, was about finding the inevitable medium pace at which things would happen. Oftentimes, you’ll see a puzzle box transforming or you’ll have one of our Cenobites coming toward you in some sort of horrifying pain-pleasure torture scenario, and it’s all done with the kind of easygoing, medium-paced certainty, which is something that we talked about a lot in the orchestration. It’s sort of a slow march toward you.”

Bruckner took a similar, nontraditional approach to his previous film, The Night House, starring Rebecca Hall as Beth, a woman mourning the death of her architect husband and who is possibly being haunted by the house he built. “Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, who wrote the script, really stacked the beginning of the second act with a lot of character work,” says Bruckner. “We’re coming out of a really socially uncomfortable scene where Beth has dinner with her co-workers and talks at length. She’s had a bit too much to drink and she comes home and her friend is caring for her. Beth lays her head in her friend’s lap and tells a rather haunting story about the history of her husband. The idea is that you’re lost in this. You don’t know where this movie is going. Rebecca has a very low growl to her voice, and it has this hypnotic effect that pulls you in. For a moment, you forget what’s happening, and it’s then that she suddenly wakes up out of a dream and the stereo is blaring and her best friend is gone. The camera never cuts, so you’ve lost the thread of what was real and what wasn’t. It’s disorienting. We were surprised by how effective it was in that moment.”

Filmmakers endeavor to be at least one step ahead of their audience, but almost every director and sound artist we spoke with expressed admiration for the jump scare in its most traditional form. Many cited quintessential examples like Mulholland Dr.’s diner sequence as a moment that made a lasting impression. “Jump scares can be maligned or overused in the horror space. But like all devices employed in horror, if used correctly it can be absolutely delectable,” says Boykin. “There’s still a place for them. I know as a teenager, watching stuff like Final Destination, it was like — that’s why I went to go see those movies.”

The best scares, he agrees, are built on a balance of expectations and doubt: The audience knows something a jump is coming; it’s simply a question of when, how, and in what context. “There are kinds of movies where you get in such a game with the audience,” Boykin explains. “You linger just long enough that a person finds themself starting to wonder, Are they actually going to do it? Their imagination does so much of the work. They are expecting something and then the film delivers, and they feel in concert with the filmmakers. It’s almost like there’s an implied high five.”

One of the most effective recent examples of a traditional jump scare comes from Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man. Inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel of the same name, the film follows domestic-abuse survivor Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), who is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) after he acquires the ability to render himself invisible. In a crucial sequence, Cecilia uncovers Adrian in her home by throwing paint on his body just as he’s climbing into an attic. Leslie Bloome and Ryan Collison worked on the film as a Foley artist and mixer, respectively, and emphasized the importance of layering sound to find the complexity in a textbook jump.

“In the film, you see the paint splash on the Invisible Man before he slides down the ladder and runs away,” says Bloome. “You can imagine in your mind what that sound’s gonna be. A paint can doesn’t sound like a bucket; it doesn’t sound plastic. It has that metal sound. So let’s start there. Having just water in the paint can, well, it’s gonna sound too sloshy. So we’ll use a wet chamois. We have a layer of the water spilling and a layer of the chamois splattering. Then he’s on top of an aluminum ladder. We had a physical ladder in the studio. Here comes the shake and the fall of the ladder in the room. Then we have his footsteps. We came up with a really cool sound utilizing rubber gloves on my feet on top of a yoga mat. It’s subtle. It’s quiet. It’s not like a normal footstep you would hear. You don’t want to hear the Invisible Man, just that little crush of the yoga mat. Again, layers upon layers of sound.”

“That was a big moment for us,” says Collison. “That moment only happens once, and it happens really fast. It was just making sure that we get that one moment right.”

Bloome ultimately likens the work to that of a jazz soloist: “A really good musician will play the spaces, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do in situations like that. It isn’t all everything at once all the time. It’s that one moment of air and then hit. That moment of silence. Really good mixers will utilize that all the time. They’ll drop out everything except a little bit of room tone and then just hammer it.”