10 Biggest Jump Scares In Star Trek

The Haunting of Deck Twelve was Star Trek: Voyager's take on the camp-fire ghost story. With a title like that, you can't really be shocked about being shocked. Ship's systems were infected by a strange entity from a now no-longer nebula. The crew got more than a few shocks of their own…. or did they?

If in doubt, do leave Neelix alone in the mess hall. That's not episode-specific, just general advice. Following protocol, were you Harry? Yeah. Sure, sure! After more than four hours in the dark with nothing but his kitchen utensils for company, Neelix ventures out in search of a mysterious noise. Curiosity has never harmed anything with whiskers, after all!

Neelix proceeds towards the turbolift at the end of the corridor, its doors on classic malfunction mode — open and close, open and close. The menacing score accompanies the hiss. If you want to break the tension for yourself before the scare, just imagine the members of the production crew pulling and pushing on either side!

Ready? Right at the threshold of the turbolift, the camera flips round, the music blares. It's Tuvok in an oxygen mask! "Calm yourself, Mr Neelix." Good advice for us all! Later, there was nebula for Neelix in the Jefferies tubes and beneath the cloche. That is, unless the whole thing was made up just to make the Borg kids jump.

Down the pitch black corridors of sister ship the USS Glenn, Stamets and away team came face-to-contorted-face with former crew. The Glenn had had a jump scare all of its own, hitting a "Hawking radiation firewall" as it exited the mycelial plane. "Helical torsion" will come as a shock to anyone! In the episode Context Is for Kings, there was enough body horror to fill at least half a Cronenberg film.

Now, when a Klingon tells you to shush, you should probably shush. If only his own advice had worked for him! Suddenly, he was ripped backwards by an animal then unknown. The end of his warrior days was nearly the end of our respiration. No time to be tardy, however. There's a giant tardigrade on the loose. Context can wait. Universal law is for the light-footed.

Little wonder the creature was on edge. It had been hooked up to the spore drive on the Glenn and would be again on the Discovery. Bound by the mirror madman, the scariest thing was how many jumps it took for (some of) the crew to acknowledge the tardigrade's pain. To do something about it. Monsters exist. This one wasn't called 'Ripper'.

This is not the zombie apocalypse, nor is it George Romero's 1978 chef-d'œuvre of the genre. Imagine, if you will, that something has gone terribly wrong. Yes, it's that flipping sex candle! Whatever possessed them to make Sub Rosa in the first place was a boon to silliness, with an attempt at a fright from beyond the grave.

Nothing says gothic horror more than anaphasic alien, a backlot copy of the Scottish Highlands some 200 light-years away, and fog on the 24th century starship. Ned Quint did try to warn us, and Beverly, in… an accent… of the shock to come. He was dead before you could say 'primary power conduit of the weather control system'.

Down on the crepuscular Caldos colony, it was all going orgasmically well for some. That is, before the exhumation. Transporter technology is a grave robber's dream, and an opportunity for Ronin the Unfriendly Not-Ghost. Nana Howard was back from the dead, bolt upright with bolts of green. Trust in the candle, Beverly. Trust in the candle! Within the definition of 'jump scare,' this was just about preposterous enough to count!

39.1 degrees Celsius. That is definitely on the warm side! And don't get us started on the humidity! No time for Geordi and alpha team to tinker with the thermostat. They've got a rendezvous with history, and a chinwag with Cochrane to attend. That does mean poor Lieutenant Paul Porter will have to be the first (of several) jump scares in Star Trek: First Contact.

Crawling alone along a Jefferies tube? What could possibly be frightening about that? All we saw was the rising shadow of an unmistakable Borg arm. All we heard was the swelling of a musical note before Porter's screams. The story of the flowing of nanoprobes told off screen by director Jonathan Frakes made our blood curdle.

The Borg, Frakes, and the script, then doubled down immediately with a second assimilation. Lieutenant Eiger headed in after her colleague, only to pop her head up and round, direct to camera. We got whirs and clicks. Eiger got a cortical node. Faced with the horror of the cybernetic, her chilling scream reverberated all the way down to Captain Picard on Earth, and probably back to the 24th century. If that didn't make you jump, perhaps Doctor Crusher's personal jump scare in sickbay did.

'Leave no trace' should be as much a principal of time travel as it is of responsible camping. Regeneration, or 'What the Enterprise-E Didn't Clean Up'. Forget the 'butterfly effect'! Nothing even remotely so delicate awaited those scientists in the Arctic. The scares of the episode relied on a sense of irony between character and viewer. We knew everything about the Borg that they didn't. With that, we were waiting to jump out of our skins. And we did.

In a horrifying twist on the Monty Hall problem, there was just one door with two Borg drones behind it. They might have looked dead on those tables. They were just a bit cold. "You seem a little jumpy," said scientist Drake to scientist Rooney. Oh yeah? Hold my hand scanner! 

"PULSE. RESP. CELL RATE. EEG." Four flat lines with a lot of power. Just don't go messing around with what we know to be a transwarp coil! Oh, no. Never mind! Those lines are getting awfully excited. The Borg breathed again, as we inhaled sharply. Drake and Rooney returned to find their colleague full of nanoprobes. The drone was behind them too. Our hearts missed a few measurements.

On a starship, there really is no better place to scare the living daylights out of someone than from the shadows of the Jefferies tubes. Prior to the borgification of his colleagues on the Enterprise, Miles O'Brien got quite the fright whilst working in the Defiant's very own metallic veins. If perhaps not enough to stir the viewer, 'Doctor Bashir' most definitely made the Chief jump. There was barely enough room to jump in the first place.

"Julian!" though not at all, was simply putting his engineering extension courses to good use… of course. As we know, the adversary of The Adversary wasn't the Tzenkethi, it was the Founder already aboard. As what was never Ambassador Krajensky jumped up and out the ceiling on the bridge, we jumped once more.

The scariest things aren't those that go bump in the night. Only the familiar turned against us is truly frightening. That and the Jefferies tubes! If the changeling could be anyone, no one could be trusted. The crew found that out the hard way a little later when the real Julian surprised them at the door. Right. That's enough duplicate Bashirs for now, thank you very much!

Two's company, at least three's a proper Denobulan marriage. As we learnt from Doctor Phlox in Doctor's Orders, Denobulan cities, like their conjugal arrangements, were purposefully crowded. For Phlox, having just one person for company (or so it seemed) through the reconfigured space proved highly uncomfortable. As a basic premise, solitude did provide for some high-end scares.

On Denobula, hallucination was considered "a harmless way for the subconscious to release nervous energy". Its effectiveness would really rather depend on what was being hallucinated. T'Pol was one thing. A Xindi insectoid and a harrowing vision of Hoshi were another. There was also the very real Porthos, who got a jump scare of his own.

The stricter definition of jump scare comes mid-episode as Phlox was mid-rounds for the neuro-sedated. Hearing a noise from outside the hull of Captain Archer's quarters, Phlox approaches the window. Suddenly, the camera swings around. Dissonant sounds play. All we see is a shadow pass across the doctor as he recoils in horror. To paraphrase from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager with a, let's say similar, plot, hallucinations might not be real, but they certainly seem to be. "That's what makes them so frightening."

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has made a great success of its multi-genre, largely episodic, (re-)approach. Its go at horror has provided some of the scariest moments of the franchise. Its revamp of that original Arena foe, though not unanimously adored, has had us bounding every which way out of our seats.

Trek has certainly done gore before. But, with all due respect to Commander Remmick and internal company, Strange New Worlds' take on the Gorn was next-level, chest-buster, terrifying. Following on from Memento Mori, season one's All Those Who Wander was a heart-pounding nod to Alien with an alien that preceded it. Hatchlings hatched aboard the crashed USS Peregrine — sorry, Buckley. All hell broke loose (again). Not even Spock could keep it together.

You can't duke it out with a Gorn. Not with one that does a surprise attack to the neck down yet another Jefferies tube, anyway. Oh, Lieutenant Duke! Promoted one minute, fed-upon the next. Dragged down the corridor screaming, blood spurting, was the last we saw of him before a photo next to Hemmer's.

Skip ahead about a season, and the Gorn were back for Hegemony. Pick almost any moment in that episode, and you're likely to be as afraid as the characters. There was one that made us jump more than most. In the downed shuttle, cut to close-up of the snarling, bloodied face of a youngling Gorn!

Off to the abandoned, almost exact copy of Deep Space 9, formerly Terok Nor, are we? Watch out for booby traps! What they saved on budget on Empok Nor in Empok Nor, they reinvested in the sheer horror of the redressed place. Stalked in the dark by a band of Cardassian super-soldiers, and then by Garak, Chief O'Brien's salvage team barely stood a chance. Add in a few jump scares, and neither did we! All they really wanted was a plasma manifold!

If something weird happens to the turbolift, it's definitely time to split up. Never mind the remnants of the regiment whose motto is "Death to All". It's practically page one of the Starfleet Officer's Manual to leave your colleagues alone in the dark. Crewman Stolzoff went to the upper level. Crewman Pechetti stayed down below. Oooh, an emblem! Oh, s**t, a guy from the Third Battalion, First Order on psychotropics come crashing through the glass! The shock for the viewer was more than just a surprise for poor Pechetti, then for Stolzoff over the ramparts.

The biggest, most literal, jump scare was reserved for Garak at the end. Having succumbed to the same psychotropic drug, the tailor went on a rampage of his own. He killed the two other Cardassians and turned a flux coupler on and up Crewman Amaro. With Nog a hostage, the Chief had to be an engineer. His phaser-tricorder-combadge combo explosion launched Garak into the air. Was he dead? No. But scary also being the pragmatic, "that was the plan".

Harry Kim must suffer — a leitmotif of Star Trek: Voyager. A Borg house of horrors — a recurring theme on this list. Somehow, in piles and pieces, Borg drones are even more terrifying, but in Scorpion, Part I, that was merely the context, the effect, of something much worse. Ensign Kim was about to get the jump scare of his life… until the next one, that is.

The tension had begun to build before Chakotay, Tuvok, and Harry beamed over. Tight shots on the ill-lit Voyager bridge at red alert underscored the deep, but measured, concern on Captain Janeway's face. Aboard what was left of the Borg cube, the camera kept equally, eerily, close to the characters. Jay Chattaway's score started sparingly, building to a crescendo of the main theme. Kes' premonition presaged the scene. We were all on edge with the three of them.

Jumping into the fray through a wall of the Borg ship, upper appendages flailing, was then the formidable Species 8472. It knocked two drones down like they were made of transparent aluminium, before taking a swing at Harry. As we recovered from the abrupt intrusion, the Ensign's shrieks of pain echoed along the transporter beam. A skeletal lock? Well, that does fit the theme!