They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with David Demchuk, whose debut horror novel, The Bone Mother, won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Adult Fiction category.
What does David love when he’s not writing fiction meant to disturb you? Spoiler alert: today’s post could be subtitled “My Favorite Jumpscares.” Everyone loves to be scared in a safe environment, right? Read on to learn more!
When I was ill as a child and was kept home from school, my mother would let me watch afternoon television while she took care of the house, assuming unwisely that anything that I could be watching at that time would be suitable for someone my age. Of course, the show I loved most was Dark Shadows. There was one memorable storyline that involved an occult artifact, the disturbingly lifelike bust of a powerful warlock, enclosed in a glass box. At a particular moment when two of the characters leave the box alone in a room, we shock-cut back to the head and its — eyes — are — open. I screamed and leapt back away from the television and tore up the stairs to my room in terror. That moment affected me for years, and likely contributed to the career I have today. Thank you Dark Shadows.
I love a good jumpscare. For me they are as much a hallmark of a great horror film or thriller as any other narrative device. I understand that this puts me at odds with many creators, critics and viewers, who view jumpscares as cheap and disreputable, a symptom of the genre’s decline. But they have been with us since the early days of horror and thriller cinema, and when done well can provide a welcome release of tension, give viewers consecutive shocks depending on how they are deployed, and misdirect the audience from the true threat. Even today’s hyperaware, narratively sophisticated audiences delight in shrieking and recoiling from the screen at a well-placed scare, and then exhale and giggle at their silliness on the rebound. Jumpscares are fun, when they’re done right.
So guess what: I’m going to tell you about some of my favorite jumpscares, from some of my favorite movies. This will necessarily involve some spoilers, so if you haven’t seen any of the following films — be warned!
Jaws: There are several jumpscares in Jaws, and two particularly grand ones. Almost everyone first thinks of the hair-raising moment when Roy Scheider is throwing chum off the side of the Robert Shaw’s boat and the shark’s gigantic open mouth emerges out of the water behind him. And, I will admit, that is a great jumpscare. However, my favorite one is quite a bit earlier, around the 50-minute mark, when Richard Dreyfuss is underwater investigating Ben Gardner’s sunken fishing boat that has, well, a great big jaws-sized hole on the side of it. As he peers in the hole, something moves out toward him that we’re sure will be the shark but instead turns out to be Ben’s post-shark-attack decapitated head. A double whammy — one of my very favorite jumpscares, provoking screams from audiences each and every time they see it.
Alien: Again, there are a few great jumpscares in this film, and one unforgettable one — the notorious dinner table scene where John Hurt’s sudden indigestion turns bloody and a fetal xenomorph bursts out of abdomen, spraying blood everywhere — and then turns, looks at every single stunned crewmember with a discernible smirk on its face — then leaps out and down onto the floor and races away. The chestbursting itself is exceptional, but the delicious little leer from the xenobaby is what puts it over the top. In that moment it felt like all the rules were broken and anything was possible.
Audition: Takeshi Miike’s low-key romantic drama about a widower screenwriter who gets a 
second chance at love when his producer friend posts an audition notice for a fake film that attracts a beautiful, submissive former ballet dancer is…well…deceptive. Our first clue that all is not as it seems when we visit the young woman’s apartment to find that it is oddly grungy and barren and that, while she sits on the floor waiting for the phone to ring, a large canvas sack in the background suddenly moves, causing viewers to clutch their chests. It is just the tiniest taste of the nightmare yet to come.
Black Christmas: This was actually the first adult film that my father took me to, when I was 11 or 12, and I’m delighted to say that it ruined me for life. There are many great scares in this movie, but none more perfect 
than when the phone company finally successfully traces the obscene phone calls terrorizing the young women in the sorority house that is the center of a series of murders in a little university town. Jess, played by Olivia Hussey and her lustrous long brown hair, receives a call from the police telling her, famously, that the calls are coming from inside the house. Which means that the killer is upstairs with her friends, and that they are very likely now all dead. A wrenching moment unfolds where she calls desperately up the stairs to try to wake them and get them to flee with her — and then she just can’t help it, she goes up the stairs to check, finds the worst, confronts the killer and smacks him with a heavy wood door, then goes racing down the stairs, can’t open the front door, turns around to try the back, and the killer’s arm reaches into the frame and grabs her by her long lustrous brown hair, causing the audience to rip the seats out of the theater in a frenzy.
Carrie: Brian DePalma’s telekinetic teen movie has only one jumpscare but it is legendary, not least because the entire film builds wave upon wave of tension, releasing a little here with comedy, a little there with pathos, but not really giving the audience any kind of release — even once the school is burned, the classmates are torched, Carrie’s mother is crucified, and the girl herself and her house burn down into charcoal. Then comes Sue Snell’s soft-focus dream sequence where she approaches the site where the house once stood, and goes to place some flowers at the cross-like For Sale sign that has “Carrie White Burns in Hell” scrawled on it. As Sue lays the flowers at the foot of the cross, well, surprise — Carrie’s bloodied hand lunges out and grabs her, prompting shrieks from audiences everywhere. Fun fact: I was too young to see the movie in its original run, so a year later I begged my poor dad to take me to see it on a double bill with Burnt Offerings. (We saw a lot of horror movies together, and he hated them.) We stood in the rain to get our tickets, sat through the entire first movie to watch the second one and when the hand jumped out at the film’s final moment, my father threw his back out. He cursed and swore all the way home and insisted he would never take me to another film. That lasted about two weeks, as I recall. Thank you, Dad — you’re a hero!
Award-winning author David Demchuk has been writing for print, stage, digital and other media for nearly 40 years. His debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017 by ChiZine Publications, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Adult Fiction category. It was listed in the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2017, came in at #22 in the National Post’s top 99 books of the year and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon.ca.
David has a special interest in queerness and monstrosity. His Cabbagetown backyard is home to a hive of curious but quick-tempered bees. He is quietly at work on a troubling new novel.
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Author Photo by Tanja Tiziana
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Alien is one of my FAVORITES.