We Ranked the 25 Jump Scares That Still Make Us Jump

David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker on the Buildup in ‘Seven’

When a rotting figure gasps for breath, the reaction of Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and John C. McGinley was so convincing, it spawned a modern myth: that they weren’t told the body was an actor, not a prop.

As it turns out, the stars did know (sorry, internet!), but the fact that the myth persists is a testament to the potency of the scene.

In an email, the director, David Fincher, credited the screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker: “Andy wrote it — it was a great idea — so I filmed it.”

But in an interview, Walker insisted it was Fincher and the prosthetics and makeup master, Rob Bottin, who turned his vision into a grisly jump scare, one that shouldn’t have worked because it was absolutely expected.

“It was so much more a build, an exciting and almost clichéd action scene that kind of slowly turns,” Walker said. Their goal was “to take the audience’s expectation of the cavalry riding in, then to get a buzz saw to the face.” — Maya Salam

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Jennifer Kent on the Soundscape in ‘The Babadook’

A bedroom door slowing creaking open. The scuffling of what sounds like cockroaches. A gravelly voice uttering the dreaded “Babadook, dook, dook.” And Amelia, a mother who’s mentally unraveling, trembling under a blanket.

In “The Babadook,” directed by Jennifer Kent, the soundscape is both classic haunted house and modern nightmare.

The scene was intended to mimic what anyone would feel lying in bed as footsteps approach. “All the sound is sucked out of the moment,” Kent said in an interview. “It’s like we become hyper-aware. I hoped to draw the audience in and have them become her.”

Kent didn’t follow tradition and incorporate most sound in postproduction. “What I tend to do is make sure that the sound is in there, enough temporary sound is in there to make sure all this visual stuff works,” she explained. “So it’s very important to rhythm. Cutting a film is much closer to music than many people probably realize.” — Maya Salam

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INTERLUDE

Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Jump Scare

By Jason Zinoman

After seeing Lon Chaney’s monstrous face unmasked in the 1925 silent “The Phantom of the Opera,” a 9-year-old Robert Bloch peed his pants and became hooked on horror. He also grew up to write the novel “Psycho,” the source for the movie with a jump scare so effective it transformed, for many, the experience of taking a shower.

Jump scares are considered the fart jokes of horror: cheap, easy and lowbrow. But that gives short shrift to a long, potent legacy. Of course, they can be crude, overdone and shoehorned in, but they can also be refined, mysterious and emotionally integrated. And as Chaney demonstrated a century ago, even the simplest ones have a power that should not be underestimated.

The stakes are high because success is binary: A jump scare produces a jolt or it doesn’t work. That puts a premium on novelty. You can’t just place another figure in a rotating mirror and expect shudders. It’s been done too many times. To really unsettle, you must subvert expectations, add misdirection, a wilder image, perhaps a disorienting sound cue. More ingenuity goes into certain jump scares than entire movies. Far from simple to pull off, a truly great one is a feat of pure cinema.

Jump scares have an advantage online, where context shifts rapidly. They can not only work independently of the movie, but also sometimes find a more popular second life outside it. In recent years, a canon has emerged, picked apart and debated by fans yet inspiring to filmmakers. In a genre more crowded than ever, where every kind of abrupt shift of camera angle, music cue or creepy image seems to have been employed to find a new way to shock, jump scares have become increasingly elaborate. At their best, they are ambitious set pieces, operating like showstoppers in musicals.

The director James Wan is a contemporary master of the art, and one of his most bravura examples is from “The Conjuring” (2013), a haunted house movie in which Lili Taylor is terrorized by a clapping sound in the cellar. Patiently established over several scenes, this ingeniously startling fright involves no special effects or monsters. There’s a bouncing ball, two hands and the oldest scare of all: fear of the dark. The result doesn’t just judder nerves. Like the most thrilling art, it rattles you into seeing old things anew while reordering your sense of the possible.

Amy Irving on the Scream in ‘Carrie’

When Amy Irving hysterically screams at the end of this Brian De Palma classic, moviegoers’ nerves were forever jangled.

In a dream sequence, when Sue Snell (Irving), lone survivor of the prom massacre committed by Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), lays flowers on her friend’s final resting place, a bloody arm (it really was Spacek’s) juts from the ground and grabs her. As she shrieks, Snell’s mother, played by Irving’s real mother, tries desperately to quiet her.

It was an emotionally intense scene to shoot, Irving said this month. “So I’m screaming and screaming and screaming, and my mom got so upset. At one point, she called me Amy. It was really hard to see her daughter so upset.”

Irving was skeptical about whether the film would work when she read the script (“I went, ‘That’s the ending?’”) and first saw a screening. Then she watched it with moviegoers: “The entire audience jumped out of their seats and scared the [expletive] out of me.” — Maya Salam

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