We've all seen a thousand scenes like this before: A person goes walking around in the darkness, perhaps on the trail of a monster or a killer, or maybe they're just searching for their lost buddy... and something they're not expecting jumps out at them, like a cat or a dog or a homeless person. This is the writers way of scaring us, the viewers, without having to actually deliver anything truly frightening- or meaningful to the story. My question is, what's the dumbest false fright you've ever seen in a movie?
Although the cat jumping out of nowhere is major league overly used, I find the campfire story told to spook the others so an idiot can jump out and scare everybody to be particularly annoying, particularly since we have plenty of advanced warning that it is going to happen.
Mine's gotta be the springloaded cat in Friday the 13th Part 7 -- not only does it jump out at the cliched time (the girl's walking around in the dark, the cat leaps, she relaxes, and then Jason attacks), but between the leap and Jason's attack, she even has time to remark that she hasn't even SEEN a cat around the house before. In other words, the cat was brought in for that one scene, to play the springloaded cat.
On the other hand, given the movie, it might have been a knowing wink at a genre convention.
The first one of these scenes that scared me as a kid was in The Thing (the original) when the scientist are left in the greenhouse and see the trail of blood leading to a cabinet. The tension builds and then as the cabinet is opened a dead dog falls out.
Mind you I was only about seven years old.
The cat thing has been used way too much although it does work most of the time. The one in Alien was scary, but after it happened I would have killed the damned cat had I been one of the crew.
The spring-loaded cat in The Kiss was the worst one ever. Damn thing looked like a wolverine that had been raped by a gremlin.
Was that the ridiculous looking thing that attacks the boyfriend in his vehicle just before he steps out in front of a semi?
kirk: "Damn thing looked like a wolverine that had been raped by a gremlin."
I've got to see that movie now :)
Yeah, that one scared me, too, but, I was no seven-year-old kid when I saw it. Actually, I was sitting on the couch in the living room watching television, and when that dead dog dropped out, I damn near hit the ceiling. Of course, that is a good scare, as opposed to a bad scare or a cheap scare.
I think the best cheap scare is from Evil Dead.
Sounds are coming from the basement, and the kids haven't even been at the cabin for more than an hour screen-time, and already a ton of weird stuff happens. Scott goes down into the basement, and minutes later, doesn't return. Ash begins walking down the steps as creepy music plays, and then it happens:
ASH FALLS DOWN THE STAIRS.
When I watched this movie with a few of my friends, most of which hadn't seen it before, back in '03, they all jumped right out of their seats (of course, there was about 12 people over, only 3 of which were guys, so go figure).
It's not dumb, but I love the tiger that comes out of the bushes in Appocalypse Now. Excuse my spelling, I'm going on only five hours sleep.
Five hours of sleep? You lucky dog. I wish I had that much (:
I absolutely love love love how everyone here is using Roger Ebert's neologism of "spring-loaded cat" to describe something we all instantly recognize.
Even though we put Mr. Ebert down, there's no denying that even the people we don't care for have an influence on how we view the world.
What I love is how Tim Burton & Pee-Wee Hermann played with this moment with Large Marge in the deisel truck & the "real ghost" Urban Legend conversation afterwards. Large Marge was both a real ghost AND a "spring-loaded cat", in that she posed no real threat. A nice touch.
Anyone know what the first "false scare" in a sound film was? In "The Cat People", a potential scream turns into the sound of the air-brakes on a bus in the next scene. Actually, this is kind of arty & , well, good . . . Never mind . . .
peter johnson/denny crane
I actually like Roger Ebert as a reviewer. He has certainly provided some entertaining one-liners in his reviews, some of which have become standard jargon. He used to pick on Gene Siskel for giving a thumbs-up to HALLOWEEN III. I guess Gene never felt like firing back with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. I would actually like to see Ebert put out a handy one volume video guide instead of Leonard Maltin or that pair that put out a video guide of movies they've never seen.
I saw a truck load ed with fruit hit by the car driven by Chevy Chase in "European family vacation"...and had to yell "Fruitcart!"
One of my personal favorites is the killer gopher hole in American Werewolf in London. The tension built so well and then boom, someone goes down. Great stuff.
And also, the prarie dog hole in TREMORS.
Nothing really scares me that much - although thats coming from a person who watches The Evil Dead to fall asleep at night.
But the movie that has scared me the most would have to be Pitch Black. Man, I saw that when I was ten or eleven (I'm turning fifteen in May) and it scared me - wait, can't really describe it - freaked me out to the point where I left 30 seconds from the ending. Of course, now I have it on video. I think it was when Fry got snatched that made me do that... I didn't expect it.
By the way, I wasn't alone.