Does a Buzzy New Movie Really Have the Most Jumpscares … Ever? I Counted Every Single One to Find Out.

Movies Does Other Mommy Really Have the Most Jumpscares of Any Movie in History? By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Rebecca Onion? Oct 09, 20264:46 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Universal Pictures. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In late August, after the instantly infamous trailer for the new film Other Mommy rocked The Odyssey’s audiences in their seats, Entertainment Weekly asked director Rob Savage how many more jumpscares his actual movie might have to offer. “Oh, like 50,” he said (while, as EW put it, “smirking”). “It depends on what you refer to as a jump scare.” Fifty? Could this be correct? There are multiple websites that crowdsource counts and time stamps for jumpscares, for the benefit of those who want to watch horror but don’t enjoy leaping out of their skin. The apparently-no-longer-updating Where’s the Jump has a list of the most jumpscary movies by decade, giving the all-time top slot, in terms of sheer quantity, to 2013’s delightfully named The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, with 32. (That’s an interesting list, showing how much jumpscare inflation the genre has suffered since the 1970s, when the top dog was 1978’s Halloween, with 13.) But user-contributors for another such site, WhenJumpScare, have kept the number-crunching going for more recent horror movies, and they have determined that since The Haunting in Connecticut 2, three movies have come along to up the ante with more than 40 surprise jolts a piece: the 2015 remake of Poltergeist, with 42 scares, and then, atop them all, The Conjuring: Last Rites and The Strangers: Chapter 2, both from 2025, and each with a record-setting 46 jumpscares. If you take these spooky stats to be authoritative—and I certainly couldn’t find any more reliable or comprehensive accounting—a movie with 50 such frights would truly be groundbreaking, a new all-time high (or low, depending on your disposition). But was Savage right, or was he just hyping his movie? To do my journalistic duty, I took my notebook to a Thursday afternoon screening of Other Mommy and tallied every last time the movie tried to shock my nervous system. First, a little background. Other Mommy is about elementary school–aged Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), her distracted career-focused mom, Ursula (Chastain), and her pot-smoking, underemployed “Daddo” (Jay Duplass, of course). Bela has struck up a friendship with a shape-shifting entity she calls “Other Mommy,” who at first manifests as an alternate Ursula (also played by Chastain). Other Mommy loves to appear in mirrors and around corners, or to pretend to be a human, then reveal her true nature with a muscle twitch or the droop of a cheek. One character calls this entity a “trickster”—a prime candidate for the production of startles. In order to pursue an aggressive jumpscare agenda (50 scares in 93 minutes?), a film must start early, and this one flashes on Other Mommy huddled up in an anatomically impossible pose under the family’s beautiful kitchen island (the same image that kicked off the notorious trailer) very early on. From there, we’re off, with jumps that are both cheap fake outs (Daddo enters the room suddenly, a towel falls out of a linen closet, another child playing at a play space hops without warning through the frame) and the real deal (Other Mommy is hanging from the ceiling, Other Mommy kills a minor character by exploding his head, Other Mommy emerges suddenly from Bela’s bed). By the end of this movie, my limbic system was utterly depleted, yet I counted only (“only”?) 34 jumpscares, enough to take the title in nearly any decade but this one, but far short of the title for all history. The author’s notes, listing every jump scare in Other Mommy in order. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Rebecca Onion. As Savage himself acknowledged, jumpscare tallying is an art, not a science, and I wonder if in citing the number 50, he might have been mentally accounting for, say, the scene in which a group of mediums trying to oust Other Mommy sets up flashes along hallways, all of which are then triggered by Other Mommy’s movements. If you were to count every single flash, each of which would startle me if they happened in isolation, maybe you could get to 50. (I counted this scene as two. Art, not science.) But to be maximally effective, a jumpscare needs to be preceded by a slow buildup of quiet tension, and in this scene, and in its brief run time, Other Mommy barely gave me a chance to rest. I beg Hollywood’s jumpscare arms racers to declare détente. Thirty-four is already too many; 50 is madman’s talk. A Slate Investigation Motherhood Horror