Like Most 21st Century American Horror, It Goes For Cheap Scares

Rating: 4/10 (20 July 2011)

There's a guy in my office that occasionally hides under my work desk and yells "BOO" when I return from the restroom. Sometimes he jumps out from the coat closet near the front door, or hides behind the wall adjacent to the office kitchen. Every time he uses the same lame "BOO" scream because he's too stupid to properly construct an effective scare. It worked the first few times but now it's totally worthless. He can't scare me. I, on the other hand, will occasionally hide behind his door in the morning before he arrives. His office lights are usually off and the lighting is dim. He'll walk into his office, feel someone's presence, turn around and see a shadow near the door. Is it a part of his imagination or is it real? He squints his eyes for a few seconds and then notices that someone is actually there. It scares the crap out of him every time, and I don't even need to scream "BOO!" Ironically, sometimes when I don't do it he'll stop by my office and say, "Man, I thought I saw you this morning."
This very basic difference between amateur shock tactics and well-constructed sequences of terror is something that 21st Century American filmmakers ignore with reckless abandon. In case you hadn't noticed, the American horror industry has sucked for quite some time, and one major reason is that they almost always go for the cheapest, laziest routes to producing scares. In the case of Insidious, it's jump scares supplemented with 100-decibel piano/violin BOOMs. If Insidious limited itself to 2 or 3 such moments (or even 4 or 5), then it could have saved enough room for more mature, expertly crafted horror elements. Unbelievably, Insidious tosses in approximately 20 jump scares, an unacceptable descent into unprecedented laziness. The condensed nature of the jumps falls prey to the law of diminishing returns. It would be like the guy at my office jumping in front of me and yelling "BOO" every 3 minutes. It quickly becomes a parody of itself.
Brian Salisbury from "Film School Rejects" makes some good points in his review of Insidious, so I'd like to quote him here: "Seriously, horror filmmakers: put a moratorium on jump scares. I know everyone and their brother is using jump scares as a counterattack against increasingly desensitized audiences, but it's time to give up the ghost (pun only slightly intended). I got sick and tired of something popping up like Jack-in-the-Box every five seconds obscuring my vision from the much more interesting, and far scarier, story going on behind it. Jump scares are the junk food of horror films – providing only superficial and extremely temporary sensory nourishment. Soon enough, your brain is hungry again for that fear response and jump scares are about as substantial as eating a box of Twinkies on Thanksgiving Day. When you watch the Oscars and the category of Achievement in Sound Mixing comes up (you know, when you normally make a trip to the bathroom), you may ponder on the value of a film's sound mixer or sound designer. Five minutes into Insidious, you will understand the dire necessity of these artists if only by virtue of the fact that we're subjected to their spectacular failures for 90 minutes. Every apparition carries with it its own deafening shriek and every jump scare is heralded with an explosion of disharmonious (read: eardrum-shredding) violins. It seems to be operating under the same delusion as Drag Me to Hell that loud = scary. But, along with jump scares, incessant loud noises are the charlatans of fright. We are not infants, so please refrain from resorting to the same tactics that terrify barely cognitive life forms."
That sums things up nicely. The praise that Insidious has earned for it's cheap scare tactics should be concerning for fans of the genre, because a transition from the recent torture/gore trend towards jump scare compilations isn't much of a progression for the pitiable American horror industry. Take away the 100-decibel piano/violin BOOMs and almost none of the jumps will work on your mainstream cinephile. (And by "work" I'm using the generous term "startle", which is probably the laziest way to scare someone.) The storyline is stupid, the acting is mediocre at best, the dialogue ranges from decent to lame, and the dramatic elements are limp. The only true positive is the fairly brisk pacing that keeps things from getting unbearably boring.
Despite everyone I know complaining about my biased preference for Japanese and South Korean horror, it's pretty damn obvious that my fellow Americans are simply too incompetent to construct long-sustained sequences of terror, produce dense atmosphere, develop interesting psychological/philosophical elements, use ambiguity properly, patiently utilize deliberate pacing to build tension, or supplement horror with good story lines and characters. If Insidious is the creme de la creme of modern American horror, then it's time to write an epitaph.