James Cameron’s favourite cinematic jump scare: “An electric shock up the spine”
James Cameron’s contributions to the Hollywood blockbuster cannot be overstated. Steven Spielberg might be the highest-grossing director of all time, but several of Cameron’s films have broken box office records that even Spielberg couldn’t touch. Some of Cameron’s other movies have become cult hits retrospectively, such as his sophomore feature, The Terminator, proving that even in the 1980s, he was ahead of his time.
Cameron’s success can be boiled down to several factors, including an intense, ego-driven, and often controversial directorial style. But as far as the director himself is concerned, a lot of it comes down to his meticulous study of successful films. He once revealed that, before writing the script for The Terminator, he created a list of the most successful films of the early 1980s and wrote down all of the aspects they shared to derive a winning formula.
His appreciation of classic movies doesn’t end with the data that can be mined from them, either. In a 2021 piece in Empire Magazine, the Avatar director delved into his favourite cinematic memories, revealing the jump scare that made the biggest impression on him.
“The most visceral audience reaction moment I remember from my early film-going years is the jump-scare in Wait Until Dark,” he said. “People can talk about Alien or Psycho or whatever all day long, but the scene that I vividly remember truly rocking the house was when Alan Arkin, the killer — presumed by the audience to be dead — leaps out of the dark and grabs poor blind Audrey Hepburn’s ankle. Of course, there’s a now-classic music sting — a single massive strum of piano strings that felt like an electric shock up the spine.”
Adding: “The entire audience lost their shit — slammed back in their seats and SCREAMED like little girls — myself included. It was physical, involuntary, universal and perfectly synchronised […] Of course when you see it now, it seems tame compared to all that’s been done in the half-century since, though still to be admired in the way the tension quietly winds tighter and tighter until the sting. Interestingly, I saw the film a year later at the drive-in and remember clearly the muffled screams coming from all the cars.”
Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark is an underrated gem of the 1960s and a tonal departure for Hepburn. In it, The Breakfast at Tiffany’s star plays a blind woman who is tormented by a group of cons looking for a doll stuffed with drugs. It’s a sadistic thriller that leans into suspense rather than gore. The villains use gaslighting as much as violence to torture Hepburn’s character, which ramps up the tension throughout the movie in an incremental way that is so masterfully paced that you don’t even realise how tense you are until that infamous jump-scare brings it all to the surface.
Although Wait Until Dark will almost certainly never be Hepburn’s most famous picture, her performance won her an Oscar nomination for its raw, sustained power. Meanwhile, Young’s direction and the blood-curdling score from Henry Mancini helped write the playbook for horror movies in the decades to come.
