It’s the season of spooks and the season of cheap candy. In this land of scares and horrifying amounts of candy, you really have to figure out the optimal way to make a small child cry because that’s what the season’s about! There’s no better way to make a child cry than by making a sudden roaring noise at them!

Let’s get this one out of the way- jump scares (as they’ve been labeled) are cheap attempts at horror. It works, it’s easy, it’s almost as cost-effective and effortless as throwing in the packaged nausea-inducing overly-processed sweetness blocks known as candy. Imagine if children got a real sweet snack for Halloween, like brownies or (homemade) cookies.

Jump scares, just like the cheap fabric children wear around, are cheap and easy, and they’ve been moved to movies as well. Many iconic movies contain jump scares and basically everything else in the horror genre contains plenty of jump scares. 

How’d we get here? According to the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia (Do you hear the teachers rioting?), Mark Robson, while editing the movie Cat People, is credited with having the first jump scare in a horror film, which was brought on by the sudden noise of a bus. Fitting enough, because nowadays it feels like that same bus is running over the genre.

In video games, the iconic series Resident Evil is known as an early example of this trope in games. Daylight was another game that used jump scares a lot for horror and was criticized in this aspect. But you know the game that almost exclusively uses jump scares and forever ruined the horror genre, especially in games, because of these jump scares?

…yes, THAT one…

The game probably most well-known for jump scares is easily Five Nights at Freddy’s. Released in 2014 by struggling developer Scott Cawthon, it revolutionized horror games by completely killing it. It was seen as a massive hit for streamers and other online content creators because of how they’d get whiplash every time an animatronic in a discount Chuck-E-Cheese would throw a temper tantrum.

Because of this, the Five Nights at Freddy’s series became an absolute juggernaut of a horror franchise. At time of writing, the series is worth over $100 million, according to ownyourownfuture.com with a movie to release soon.

As such, people who developed indie horror projects REALLY wanted to emulate the same style. This gave us many derivative horror games that take place in a kid-friendly setting turned evil which prominently featured jump scares (Many of which became internet sensations).

These projects, across both games and movies, have made horror feel derivative. It’s not about what happens, it’s about when you’re getting jump scared. This also makes it so that it’s not scary unless you’re watching the first time. Just like humor, it gets old fast.

Yeah this joke’s old already.