CINE 350: Film and New Media

The Startle Response

My wife is often startled when the phone rings. The phone doesn’t bother me or the kids, but all of us have, at one time or another, found ourselves alone in a room only to turn and be startled by someone hovering behind us. More typically, I recently saw a horror film with a friend. He was startled so frequently and forcefully that I worried he would pull a muscle. Millions have been startled while watching threatening film scenes. We can pinpoint the frames in Cat People where one of film’s first startles—a public bus of all things—bursts into frame; we can study the exact moment in Jaws when Hooper, while scuba diving, is startled by a corpse popping through a shattered boat hull; we can inspect the infamous startle in Wait Until Dark when Alan Arkin’s psychotic killer (supposedly incapacitated) leaps, Olympian-like, after Audrey Hepburn’s blind housewife. Since the early 40s, films have refined and increasingly used the startle effect. For instance, 1941’s Cat People deploys two startle effects, while Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake offers 8, a typical example of the hypersensationalization of the post-Psycho horror and thriller film.