„…a cliché of modern horror films.“
I spent hours last night watching AOC’s description of what happened to her in the first week of January. If you’re interested in my take it’s here. But this morning I came across this Erik Wemple piece from yesterday comparing what happened to AOC to an incident from a couple years ago when anarchists showed up at Tucker Carlson’s house. So in Wemple’s view, that story is not so different from the one AOC told about hearing someone pounding on her office door. Wemple argues Carlson is being a hypocrite for criticizing AOC’s story while telling a similar one about his own wife. I see a difference and here’s the best way I can explain it. Do you like horror movies? If you’ve seen a few horror movies then you’re aware of what a “jump scare” is. In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s a pretty decent description from Wikipedia: Common in film since the 1980s, the jump scare has been described as “one of the most basic building blocks of horror movies”. Jump scares can surprise the viewer by appearing at a point in the film where the soundtrack is quiet and the viewer is not expecting anything alarming to happen, or can be the sudden payoff to a long period of suspense. Some critics have described jump scares as a lazy way to frighten viewers, and believe that the horror genre has undergone a decline in recent years following an over-reliance on the trope, establishing it as a cliché of modern horror films. So the way this works is that you have a character in the film, usually the protagonist, in a situation where there is a real threat. The audience knows the threat is somewhere out there, looking to kill the protagonist with a big knife or something worse. And then, for some reason, the protagonist decides to walk down a dark alley or enter a deserted house, etc. And we have a moment of tension and suspense where the audience is thinking, don’t be stupid, the killer/monster is out there! Sometimes the director will even resolve that tension for a moment so you think the danger is over: Oh, it was just the cat.
