Catering to a ravenous appetite for ghost stories, Victorian theater-makers used illusions like Pepper’s Ghost (which projected a translucent figure using a sheet of glass) and the Corsican Trap (which made an actor appear to rise from the ground). In Paris, the Grand Guignol Theatre became famous for embracing visceral morbidity, specializing in gory dramatizations of real-life murder and mutilation.
“As opposed to a slice of life theater, they developed a slice of death theater,” says Richard J. Hand, a professor of media practice at the University of East Anglia. He says that to satisfy the audience’s craving for gruesome thrills, Grand Guignol performances involved copious fake blood and depicted people being decapitated, skinned alive, and splattered with acid. Foreshadowing the notoriety of slasher cinema, the Grand Guignol promoted anecdotes of fainting audience members requiring treatment from the theater’s in-house physician. But while the gratuitous gore and marketing hype might prefigure modern slasher flicks, these early forms of shock entertainment are not precursors to the cinematic jump scare.
According to Hand, an expert on past and present horror theater, the element of surprise works differently on the stage than it does on a screen. Movie scares need to be fast and sudden, but in a live show, slowness is more effective. “You have that captive audience in that shared space, in that shared time,” says Hand. If something happens too quickly, the audience might miss it. Instead, theater relies on gradually building tension between the viewer and performer.
As scary fare transitioned from stage to screen, it took several decades for filmmakers to develop the correct formula of pacing and sound design to make audiences leap out of their seats.
The first cinematic jump scare is generally agreed to be in 1942’s Cat People. To modern eyes it’s pretty tame, featuring the abrupt arrival of a bus on a deserted street. Scare techniques only really began to escalate after American film censorship laws relaxed in the 1970s, ushering in an era of ax murderers, demonic possessions, and malevolent clowns. Eighties slashers perfected a reliable delivery system for adrenaline-inducing shocks and, while they’re not exactly considered high art, this kind of scare-centric filmmaking continually makes bank at the box office.
To state the obvious for a moment, horror thrives on provoking negative emotions like dread, disgust, and terror. There’s growing evidence that experiencing fear in a controlled environment can be therapeutic, but no one actually watches Saw or Terrifier for self-improvement. They’re here for entertainment, and the science of why people enjoy these negative emotions is still a developing field.