Last night, I watched someone play a horror game titled "Five Nights at Freddy's" in which you're a security officer at a fictional run-down Chuck E. Cheese-esque place where the animatronics come to life at night and -- you guessed it -- try to kill you. Quite surprisingly, it's a rather well-done game that's really creepy and I quite liked it. Unfortunately, the game has really cheap jump scares when you die, where the animatronics get all up in your face while a loud, distorted sound plays. The jump scares are basically screamers and they're really fucking annoying. It would have been a much better game if it didn't have these screamer jump scares. So it got me thinking about something.

With the horror genre, audiences willingly subject themselves to terror. The quality of a horror movie, game, book, etc. usually depends on whether it successfully terrifies the audience. Of course, the quality of the Work also depends on the artistry, but that in turn is a major component of the scariness. However, just because a point in the movie or game can scare the viewer/player doesn't mean that the scare is good. Therefore, I believe that fear, when it relates to horror media, can be separated into two types: Positive Fear and Negative Fear.

Positive Fear is that kind where you are enjoying being scared in a masochistic sort of way. You are enjoying the thrill of it. The fear is positive when the Work is executed well -- the plot makes sense, characters are not stupid, the visuals and audio convey an atmosphere of dread and wrongness. You are scared for good reasons. The Work is objectively good, which contributes to the subjective scariness of it.

Negative Fear is the type in which you are successfully scared by the Work, yet not in an enjoyable way. You are annoyed by the scare. You hate the Work for going for a scare that requires little effort. The Work is most likely objectively bad because it couldn't scare the audience with the atmosphere and compensated for it with loud noises and a terrifying image in your face. However, some Works, like the game I mentioned above, are objectively good, yet chose to add cheap and effortless jump scares.

Now, I have always hated jump scares. I consider them all cheap and effortless. However, I believe you can still startle a person in a Work without the scare being a jump scare. It can be a subtle scare, like something uncanny silently showing up in the background. That can work and would be an example of Positive Fear. I wouldn't consider it a jump scare, though, as some would not notice it. That's fine, as fear is subjective, as is any other emotion that is to be conveyed in a Work in a different genre. It is the objective artistic quality that heavily influences the scariness of the Work, as I said earlier, because it doesn't need to rely on jump scares -- only atmosphere. If the Work is objectively good and atmospheric, it is likely that it will scare the majority of the audience in a positive way. Jump scares don't do that.