u/ClearCounter

I watched the Conjuring 4 : Last Rites with my partner the other night and was largely unimpressed for a variety of reasons, but I just wanted to talk about one.

I haven't seen all the Conjuring movies, but especially in this one, they use the same jump scare "tempo", I guess, literally over and over, to the point where it's just not doing it for me.

It goes like this

Character gets the creeps, the camera zooms in on them or what they're looking at while the score climbs higher and higher, choir howling, higher and higher until--------they turn on a light or calm down or whatever, it seems everything is ok. The score goes quiet...

They turn to move on doing whatever and, GAH! a scary ghost is right next to them, the score spikes and the ghost then proceeds to do spooky things.

This scare tactic can be effective because the filmmakers have ramped up tension, then provided a false sense of security, a lie that the danger has passed. They then take advantage of the breath of relaxed tension to spike the audiences cortisol , at least in theory.

But if you do this over and over in the same movie, in the exact same way, it just doesn't work and it's really just annoying. I'm sure the Conjuring franchise isn't hot stuff here, but it's just killing me that I showed my partner The Thing, and Alien, and The Descent and the thing she goes to bed scared of is mirror ghosts.