The “shameless” cinema gimmick Roger Ebert couldn’t stand: “The trick is so old”
While he wasn’t necessarily biased against any genre or actor in particular, it became increasingly clear through the years that Roger Ebert liked what he liked and really, really hated what he hated.
As much as it’s untrue to say that he was averse to horror, seeing as he awarded full marks to several classics and showered many more in high praise, there were several offshoots that he loathed. Usually, the more excessive and gratuitous the violence, the more likely he’d be to excoriate it in his review.
Again, that’s fair. While his profession dictated that he approach everything with an open mind until it was changed otherwise, it was hardly controversial or contentious for Ebert to savage a film that prioritised blood, guts, gore, and splayed body parts over any sense of plot, character, or narrative.
He despised video game adaptations, too. After coming under heavy fire for claiming that video games could never be art, he refused to budge from that perspective, and he was entitled to do so when the overwhelming majority of console-to-screen translations that he was forced to sit through were shite.
It’s reductive to say that Ebert didn’t like horror; he just didn’t like bad horror, or horror that arrived on the screen with no other intention than testing the audience’s gag reflex. However, there was one staple of the medium that bugged him to the extent that he celebrated his 25th anniversary in the business by informing everyone how much it bugged him.
“I also enjoy being frightened in the movies,” he clarified in a 1992 op-ed to celebrate his quarter-century milestone as a critic. “But I am bored by the most common way the movies frighten us, which is by having someone jump unexpectedly into the frame. The trick is so old a director has to be shameless to use it.”
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a person, since the old ‘cat walking on piano’ approach to horror filmmaking has seen the jump scare become so prevalent that viewers have been conditioned to expect them, which only makes it harder for a director to wring a genuine sense of terror out of their shot, as opposed to going for the instant and thankless gratification of a quick-fix shock
“Alfred Hitchcock said that if a bunch of guys were playing cards and there was a bomb under the table and it exploded, that was terror, but he’d rather do a scene where there was a bomb under the table and we kept waiting for it to explode, but it didn’t,” Ebert elaborated. “That was suspense. It’s the kind of suspense I enjoy.”
He’s not wrong, but we’ve been living through the age of the jump scare for so long that it’ll probably never end. Admittedly, it’s probably the easiest way to guarantee a fright, but it’s also the laziest, and Ebert was completely sick and tired of it by the early 1990s, but it still hasn’t gone away.
