The Startle Effect: Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory Author(s): Robert Baird Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 12-24 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1213732 . Accessed: 17/12/2013 11:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 192.17.24.199 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:10:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Robert Baird The Startle Effect Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory Lewton particularlyenjoyed devising moments in his films which would cause audiences to gasp in terror. His name for these moments of sudden shock was "busses."The term derives from the Central Park sequence of Cat People. -Joel E.Siegel, ValLewton: The Realityof Terror Gasping in terror: Alien 12 This content downloaded from 192.17.24.199 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:10:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions y wife is often startled when the phone rings. through a shattered boat hull; we can inspect the in- The phone doesn't bother the kids or me, but all famous startle in Wait Until Dark (1967) when Alan of us have, at one time or another, found ourselves Arkin's psychotic killer (supposedly incapacitated) alone in a room only to turn and be startled by some- leaps, Olympic-like, after Audrey Hepburn's blind one hovering behind us. My son Sean, like most re- housewife. My study of over 100 American horror and spectable eight-year-olds, can, to his great pleasure, thriller films from the early 30s to the present reveals startle his older sister. There are rarer and stranger formal refinements and increased usage of this effect. startles. Once, walking across a parking lot in the For instance, 1942's Cat People deploys two startle middle of the day, I was startled by what turned out to effects, while Paul Schrader's 1982 remake offers be a leaf. It wasn't a dangerous leaf, but, pushed by eight, a typical example of the hypersensationaliza- the wind, it made an uncanny scuttling sound behind tion of the post-Psycho horror/thriller film. me. The sound was odd enough and "out of place" David J. Skal, echoing others, claims that the birth enough to startle me. Garden-variety startles provide of cinema itself was an occasion for audience startles: an affective punctuation to various folk entertainments In America, more direct and visceral means such as hide-and-seek, surprise parties, spook houses. were favored to hold and startle an audience- One confidante tells me that upon leaving Madame locomotives toward the for in- Tussaud's in London she once saw visitors who were hurtling screen, stance, or a bandit firing his gun directly into startled by a motionless "wax figure" that suddenly the camera's eye (both effects were employed moved: all a bit of fun orchestrated by the manage- in 1903 by Edwin S. Porter in The Great Train ment. More typically, I once saw a horror film with Robbery). Quaint though these techniques may a friend who was startled so frequently and forcefully seem today, they once had the power to make that I worried he would pull a muscle. Since, at the audience members faint.3 time, I was writing a dissertation on cognition and the horror film, I did not let these and other startles pass, Examples such as these serve as apocryphal encapsu- but considered how a leaf, or a phone, or a film can lations of the birth of cinematic sensationalism, and, startle us, and whether the mere fact of startles and/or according to David Bartholomew, share something with a theory of their function might add to or challenge horror: current thinking about the mind and its relation to real Its origin [horror], indeed, is the of all and virtual space. origin moving pictures, going right back to the Lu- Many laymen and not a few philosophers and psy- miere brothers' 1895 exhibition of A Train En- chologists have been content to relegate startle to the tering a Station, a short category of dumb reflex, little more dynamic than a documentary sequence to which early audiences reacted with a sneeze or a knee jerk. That film startles occur only dur- frenzy, ducking from the onrush- ing a particular scene type should alert us that some- away seemingly ing train on the screen and the audi- thing complicated and odd is occurring. Indeed, I believe fleeing torium in fear. Of the Lumieres' film startles reveal the fundamental characteristics of course, little film was not a horror film as we've come to cinema spectatorship, offering the most pointed op- know it, but it provoked fear and portunity for addressing and explaining the age-old psycho- logical unease in its audiences (who had not paradox that fictions and representational spaces can yet learned how to "look" at movies), and that stimulate intense emotional responses in spite of an is how the horror film has awareness of fictionality.2 precisely always functioned historically.4 Millions have been startled while watching threat- ening film scenes. We can pinpoint the frames in Cat These familiar stories of early spectator naivete seem where one of People (1942) film's first startles-a always to imply that more modem, media-savvy view- bus of public all things-bursts into frame; we can ers can resist manipulation. No one today, after all, runs study the exact moment in Jaws (1975) when Hooper, from or faints before hurtling movie trains, or flinches while scuba diving, is startled by a corpse popping from camera-directed gunplay. However, viewers, even 13 This content downloaded from 192.17.24.199 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:10:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions filmmakers and media critics, can still be startled by What then conjures up a memory of the sleep- film. The origin of this still viable startle effect is rec- less torment of an earlier evening? The noises ognized as 1942, in the famous bus scene from Val Lew- chiefly ... the noises are quite the sole con- ton and Jacques Tourneur's B-movie surprise success, tribution to alarm. If only you shout loudly Cat People, where Alice (Jane Randolph), being fol- or strangely enough, and if only you can con- lowed by something from screen left, is surprised by a trive to make the sound unexpected, somebody bus barreling in from screen right. Dennis Fischer of- is sure to be terrified. In that respect, at least, fers a typical analysis of Cat People's startle effect: this piece displays a sure sense of the theater. "This type of scene with a slow buildup and sudden re- There is very little of Bram Stoker in it. But lease became known as a 'bus,' and was a component most of us jumped in our seats at least once in many horror films thereafter. The idea was to get the in every act.6 audience to expect something and then catch them to- Meanwhile, back in the colonies, the American pro- tally off guard from another direction."5 duction of Dracula was touring to great success and Ironically, the first horror and thriller films of the likewise suffering criticism for its sensationalism-this sound era, a ten before Lewton, did not good years fully from the New YorkMirror: exploit the startle effect. The massively popular Drac- ula (1931) offers no end of Gothic mise-en-scene. The To many the eerie horrors of this shocker sug- Count glides about, a highly visible, stately menace, gested but the impotent boos of a child dressed never once making a startling move or entrance. This is in a bedsheet. One jumps instinctively because a bit odd, for we know that the theater made use of the of the noise and clamor of the procedure, but startle response in earlier outings. A 1927 review from there is still a deep set realization of the juve- the Times on the opening of Dracula in London's Lit- nility and fallaciousness of the youngster's tle Theater suggests just how sensational the play was: prank.7 Cat People 14 This content downloaded from 192.17.24.199 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:10:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Like later deprecations of film startles, theater critics The traditional view is that startle represents the made it quite clear that startles were, in some man- most extreme form of sensationalism, a stark contrast ner, antithetical to art and culture. Yet startles, surely, with the ideals of art and thought. Here is Stanley J. whether theatrical or cinematic, are not without virtue. Solomon: Their widespread use in the Gothic tradition suggests Shock all too frequently springs from some value, if not for critics, then at least for artists merely surprise, generated equally by a murdererleap- and patrons. In this vein, the two Dracula stage plays ing from a dark alley with knife in hand, and didn't just resort to an occasional startle-they sys- a child jumping from behind a wall and yelling tematically deployed them-and with apparent glee.