Conjuring a fright: what makes a great horror movie? | Tom Shone

For today's sophisticated audience, it's not all about jump scares - the best horror movies keep playing even if you shut your eyes

There's nothing like genre junkies to cut to the chase. The glory days of drive-in-theatre critic Joe Bob Briggs may be past ("No dead bodies. One hundred seventeen breasts. Multiple aardvarking. Lap dancing. Cage dancing. Lesbo Fu. Pool cue-fu... Joe Bob says check it out"), but his spirit lives on. While movie critics have been going into raptures over The Conjuring - comparing its director James Wan to David Lynch, calling his direction "rhapsodic", finding his film "a metaphor for moviegoing itself" - horror afficionados have been getting down to basics: how many jump scares does it have? And: are they the right sort?

You know jump scares. The moment in a horror film when the protagonist wipes the steam from a bathroom mirror and sees the psycho standing behind them. The hand coming out of the grave at the end of Carrie. The axe in the back of Scatman Crothers in The Shining. The bed-swallowing in Nightmare on Elm Street. According to The Verge:

"A well-done jump scare breaks down the same way Michael Caine describes illusions in The Prestige, with three distinct steps. First there's the pledge: a character is introduced into a situation where danger is present. They hear a rattling in the kitchen, or voices when they're home alone. Then comes the turn, where the character finds a reasonable explanation, or the immediate threat is somehow removed.

Everything seems all right, and the audience lets its guard down. That's when the filmmakers execute the prestige, hitting an unsuspecting audience with the actual scare - usually accompanied by a shrieking music cue or sound effect."

The only trouble being that finding an unsuspecting audience these days is like looking for a virgin at summer camp. We're so well versed in the shot rhythm of the jump scare that audiences get them ahead of the beat: all you need do is cut to a closeup of your heroine, and the audience is tensing it's abdominals in preparation.

"Deafening noises, bursts of music, faces materializing from nowhere can make the heart skip, send popcorn flying from tubs and reduce one to watching a screen through woven fingers, but after going home and surviving the night, all the just-a-cat moments and demon faces and gore slip from the mind," said Jake Cole at Film.com. While admitting that "some jump scares are so ingeniously executed they take on a life of their own," the fact remains: "Jump scares don't cause nightmares."

Nicely said. Early word was that The Conjuring, James Wan loving homage to the days of The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror, was full of them. "We've seen swarms of birds, levitating furniture and chaotic third-act exorcisms before, even down to its very last shot, The Conjuring demonstrates a scary - and welcome - amount of care," said William Goss at Film.com. The movie was choc-a-block with jump scares, but they punched their weight. "Each of the scares are actually pretty creative in their jump," said Ain't it Cool. This was music to the ears of all the horror fans out there, their senses dulled by too many it-was-just-a-cat and oh-it's-the-caretaker. The debate over jump scares goes back to Hitchcock's famous definition between shock and suspense, delivered to Francois Truffaut in 1962:

"We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.

Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed."

Hitchcock didn't stick to his own rule, of course, delivering some of the most famous jump scares of all in Psycho: the shower scene, the knife attack on Arbogast, the revelation of Mrs Bates in the basement. It's the main reason Psycho, of all his films, hasn't worn so well: shock dates, but suspense does not.

The best horror movies keep playing even if you shut your eyes - they beat on the backs of your eyelids, like ideas that can't be shut away. Very little of The Shining takes place during the night and the maze in which Nicholson freezes over at the end - Kubrick's invention, not King's - could be an allegory for a man trapped in his own mind. A very Kubrickian nightmare, to be sure - shutting yourself in with the maniac - but also a reminder that there are no exteriors in the best horror movies, only interiors, no bogeyman worse than a stray thought. Cole's top 10 of atmospheric shockers is excellent. Here is mine:

Don't Look Now by Nicolas Roeg (1973)

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1958)

Nosferatu (FW Murnau, 1922)

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)

Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

Lincoln Memorial partially reopens after green paint spill

Police say spill 'appears intentional based off of the splatter', which was discovered on Lincoln statue early Friday morning

Katie Rogers

Egypt: Two dead as rival rallies clash - live updates

Egypt is braced for more violence as the military urges its supporters onto the streets, while supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi also plan to rally

Haroon SiddiqueBen Quinn

Oscar Pistorius leaves court after posting bail - live coverage

Oscar Pistorius told he will be freed on bail as he awaits trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp
Read a summary of the magistrate's reasons
Judge also raised questions about Pistorius's account

Paul OwenTom McCarthy

Why American modern art blows British talent out of the water

Watch out Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein are coming to galleries in the UK and their ideas are bold and breathtakingly original

American art shines forth in Britain this spring. Great American artists roll through top London galleries like hotshots on the freeway leaving double-decker buses full of British artists far behind. These guys are the real greats. Works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are at the Barbican, showing a freedom of thought that is breathtaking. Johns puts a cast of a foot on the inside of a box's hinged lid, with a layer of sand beneath it, so the foot leaves an impression as accurate yet fragile as a memory: the work is called Memory Piece. Meanwhile, Rauschenberg has made, in collaboration with John Cage, a print of a car's tyre track (Cage drove the car). At the Gagosian gallery, you can see his Jammers, dream-sails of coloured fabric that seem to float like dancers.

But wait, speeding round the bend comes Roy Lichtenstein, replying to these freeform improvisers with sharp, cool one-liners in his retrospective at Tate Modern. This quintessential creator of 60s pop is in London at the same time as the 50s experiments of Johns and Rauschenberg. That is a double measure of first-rate Americana. If you need a chaser, try the National Gallery's exhibition of Frederic Church, one of the founders of American painting in the 19th century.

This great American spring in art could not be more timely: anti-American feeling has reached a pitch among Britons that damages our own cultural life. We speak the same language as the US - even though Spanish is obviously a rival tongue there - and that, plus such shared artistic and literary heroes as John Singer Sargent, Henry James, TS Eliot and David Hockney, has always ensured a deep connection with American culture.

Today, the power of US popular culture is as vast as ever, but what is harder to acknowledge is the originality and quality of serious American high art and its profound contribution to modern thought. Evidence? The fact that no American has won a recent Nobel prize for literature is perhaps the most glaring and debated symptom of a refusal by today's wider world to revere American creative giants.

It is not hard to say why Europeans are less reverent towards the great American artists than we used to be. The catastrophe of the Iraq war left all kinds of scars. But, if we in Britain ignore America's outstanding contribution to modern culture, we risk vanishing into a nostalgic cul-de-sac. In the 80s and 90s, British novelists admired and emulated the modern American novel. Today's fashionable British novels are far less American and far more inward-looking. There has perhaps never been a more exclusively British Booker winner than Hilary Mantel: her fictional version of Tudor Britain owes nothing to Philip Roth, that's for sure. I prefer British writers who are open to American influence, such as David Mitchell.

In a different way, the very British modern art of Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst earns mileage from the fact that people don't know enough about a giant such as Rauschenberg. Indeed, Emin's bed was a rehash of a work by Rauschenberg. The same American giant was using stuffed animals to hilarious, provocative effect in his art decades before Hirst pickled a shark.

The wave of major American art now sweeping over Britain should make us wake up and smell the coffee. There are more things in modern art than Emin ever dreamed of. And a lot of them were born in the USA.