The Sounds of Horror ·

26 Jun 2024, 00:00

An aural history of scary movies, and the Foley art and design that make them great.

Photo-Illustration: Mike Essl, Vulture; Photo: Dimension Films

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Horror movies are a tennis match between the haunting absence of sound and the maximalist assault of big noise. They serve up the understated chill of a woman walking alone at night — the slight click-clack of her heels against pavement raising hairs on the back of your neck — and volley back with a silence-shattering bus rushing into frame. Even the faintest of actions, like a knife slicing through air in a Scream installment, can produce eardrum-piercing shrieks when you least expect it. Flesh emits a powerful constellation of gooey noises in a Hostel movie, and leather tightening is positively stentorian. Watch enough scary movies, and you start to recognize the acoustic pattern.

We have an unseen horde of sound mixers, designers, and Foley artists to thank for much of this audio magic. Whereas legendary composers like John Carpenter and newcomers like Disasterpiece are credited with making horror feel cinematic, Foley work and sound design is what makes it feel real — even when it’s not. Artists take footage shot in production (and created by visual-effects artists in post-production) and reproduce or imagine its sounds — the swish of a curtain, the chatter of teeth — using props and digital effects to amplified results. Their humble tools break gore down into its component parts and give space for every rip and pop to offend; open a Foley artist’s fridge and you might find raw chickens meant to mimic sliced-up human flesh, or a whole pig’s head destined to get beat to hell to simulate the sound of a skull breaking. Elsewhere in their office is an old chamois responsible for a shocking array of gushy sounds. Next time you visit, think about bringing fresh celery or a box of rigatoni as a gift, in case the artist needs to snap some femurs that day.

In celebration of all that head-splitting effort, Vulture has spent the spooky season poring over the sounds of scary movies, culled from our own memories as well as various conversations with sound designers and Foley artists. (And by sounds, we mean anything but scripted conversation and score.) Consider this a brief aural history of horror, or a taxonomy of some of the greatest Foley art and sound design from Cat People to the new Hellraiser and how each came to be. If anything, it’s a tribute to the technicians who walk over glass in stilettos, wrestle themselves in loose clothes, and fight a slab of beef to make us feel like we’re right there in the room with the Big Bad and the Final Girl.

Body Trauma

These are the throw-up sounds. The bone breaks and the gut stabs and the amputations that make you dry heave. You’ve been warned.

The Femur Snap

Examples: the effects of the torture device in Saw III, the infanticide-by-mob in mother!, the deadly dance in Suspiria (2018).

Or the rib crack, if you want. No matter the big bone, if you need to get under someone’s skin with the sound of hard tissue breaking on film, look no further than your kitchen. There’s a high-percentage chance you’re listening to a Foley artist shatter dry rigatoni noodles, break sticks of celery, or bust carrots in two under a sheath of leather.

The Slow Saw

Examples: the self-decapitation in Hereditary, Cary Elwes hacking off his own foot in Saw, the amputations in Audition.

Circular saws, table saws, and chainsaws have done a lot of high-intensity work in horror movies over the decades, but there’s something extra terrible about the patient, excruciating sound of a manually operated sawing device going to work on the human body. In reality, the sounds of the Slow Saw come from Foley artists sweating over whole chickens, furiously dissecting them with wires and knives.

The Unpretentious Thud

Examples: the other decapitation in Hereditary, the body hitting a bathroom wall in Terrified, Leatherface’s mallet attack in 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Squish and snap sounds get a lot of glory in horror movies, but the icky bass of a good body thud should not go unappreciated. People are big gooey sacks of meat, after all. Which it why Foley artists take to pounding the hell out of pig heads and sides of beef with wooden mallets to get that slam of a body part just right. There are vegetarian options, too. Sound pro Wayne Bell, who worked on the original Texas Chainsaw, says the the thuds you hear when Leather’s mallet whams down on human heads are the result of hitting melons and cabbages.

The Vivisection

Examples: the face slice in Evil Dead (2013), the scalp rip in Hostel Part II, the full body bisection in Bone Tomahawk, the spilling of intestines in the opening of Scream.

Vivisection is all about getting someone’s insides on the outside. But where we see split flesh, Foley artists say we’re actually hearing a wet leather chamois being squeezed and slopped around on a sound stage, along with some globs of viscous soap, seafood entrails, or pumpkin innards squished through hands.

Deadly Vocals

A violation of the body isn’t the only way to unnerve a horror fan. There need not be viscera if you have a scary enough, unholy enough, or other worldly enough vocal expression to send a viewer running for the aisles. They can be as strange as an alien call or as pedestrian as a labored breath, but they let us know we are no longer safe.

The Death Breath

Examples: Clarice panicking in The Silence of The Lambs, Frank Booth wheezing between outbursts in Blue Velvet, the whisper of the devil in The Witch, Michael Myers in Halloween.

You can create an entire claustrophobic universe of fear with one simple sound: heavy breathing. It’s the sound of human panic, of animalistic exertion, and a body under stress. Whether from predator or its prey, if you’re near enough to hear it breathing, you’re probably too close.

Actor and filmmaker Nick Castle entered Halloween lore in 1979 because he was friends with John Carpenter, and the soon-to-be horseman of the ’70s horror apocalypse needed a figure to fill out The Shape. Castle breathed heavily into the Michael Myers rubber mask 40 years apart — providing Haddonfield’s very own Darth Vader vocal accompaniment in the original movie as well as the 2018 reboot. He recorded in and out of the mask for a variety of effects.

The Death Croak

Examples: Danny Torrance’s “friend” Tony in The Shining, the raspy scream of the Babadook in The Babadook, the hissing growl of Angela in Sleepaway Camp, Kayako’s warning in Ju-On.

What is so awful about that throaty croak some demons and ghosts and little kids let loose? Is it the sound of the devil himself? The call of some prehistoric predator we are genetically determined to fear? It’s an indescribable death rattle, the croak that lets you know hell is near. Writer and director Takashi Shimizu first started making the sound now synonymous with the ghost of Kayako Saeki when he was a kid. Shimizu’s parents hated it, but the actual human guttural moan made cinematic history anyway.

The Kaiju Bellow

Example: the Godzilla shrieks in Godzilla (1954 and 2014).

If any creature deserves its own category, it’s the kaiju. In the original Godzilla from 1954, the sound team tried to make his signature roar using actual animal noises, but composer Akira Ifukube is the one who cracked the case by using a leather glove coated in pine-tar resin that was then rubbed against the string of a double bass to create that sound from the friction. Jump ahead 60 years and the sound pros on 2014 Godzilla took a more composite approach. Sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn placed dry ice to sublimate on a metal vent, which produced vibrating and screaming noises as it evaporated. That was enhanced with the low-end sounds of rocks crunching. To get that finishing bellow, however, they dragged a giant wooden crate across a polished floor and deployed scientific microphones to capture sounds outside frequencies perceivable by the human ear before pitching them down in the studio. When they ended up playing the final product over gargantuan speakers on the Warner Bros. backlot — to record it with the effect of bouncing off real buildings and natural topography — the roar was heard from people about three miles away.

Predatorial Clicks

Examples: the Death Angel creatures in A Quiet Place, the chattering cenobite in Hellraisers, the aliens in Signs, Charlie Graham’s tongue click in Hereditary, the Yautja in Predator.

What do dinosaurs, Predators, and cenobites all have in common? A lot of them make a similar attention-getting clicking sound that, while not scary on its own, takes on a shade of serious menace when you realize it’s attached to creatures that can disembowel you in a heartbeat.

For the raptors in 2015’s Jurassic World, sound designer Al Nelson used audio of tigers purring and tortoises mating to give voice to the pack hunters. But no one did it like voice actor Peter Cullen, who was brought in to audition for the “voice” of the Yautja in Predator right on the heels of having done exhaustive work as King Kong. He was still coughing up blood from that assignment when he had the idea in a 20th Century Fox soundstage to imitate the sounds of a horseshoe crab he once saw struggling on its back.

The Post-Wilhelm Screams

Examples: the sudden screams beneath the lawnmower in Sinister, George Bennings’s death wail in The Thing (1982), the tunnel trogs in The Descent, the furious spirit warning off a priest in The Amityville Horror (1979), the pod people’s cry in Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1978), Toni Collete’s anguished yelp in Hereditary, the throat-ripping caterwaul in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead.

Since the pictures could talk and 1928’s The Terror brought sound to scary cinema, the scream is what unites us all in horror. The shrieking victim will always be our avatar of fear, and the wailing villain will always signal his madness with a godless outcry. But in world far removed from Distant Drums, primal screams sound a little different. Her unique approach to wailing is why, among so many other reasons, Toni Collette deserves an Oscar for her horror work.

Ben Burtt skipped a human sound effect altogether, stock or otherwise, for his work on the ’78 adaptation of Body Snatchers. Burtt did sound design for Star Wars shortly before taking the assignment, which would end up sandwiched between A New Hope and Alien on his IMDb credits page. To create the foundation for the otherworldly scream of the pod people, Burtt used the squealing of pigs.

The Rabid Whisper

Examples: the phone calls in Black Christmas (1974), the soft-speaking in Gonjiam: The Haunted Asylum.

A not-so-distant cousin to the Death Breath is the Rabid Whisper, notably in Gonjiam and so scary that hearing a loved one coo in your ear will unleash a primal urge to punch them square in the mouth. But how do you perform the sound of, say, one psycho killer tormenting a group of sorority girls with obscene and threatening phone calls? You recruit several people to do the job. The main voice of Black Christmas’ Billy is actor Nick Mancuso, but director Bob Clark contributed his own voice and screams to the phone calls, too, along with an uncredited actress. All together, whisper (and giggle and shout and cry and threaten their victims) like one fully coalesced spree killer.

Malevolent Notifications

It’s not that technology is evil. It’s that the things people do with technology are evil. (And sometimes in horror movies it’s the things that demons, ghosts, and serial killers do with tech.) The original Black Christmas turned a rotary phone into a warning, Scream made the cordless phone a harbinger of death twenty years later. There’s something especially insidious about weaponizing the ways we announce ourselves to each other — about turning a notification into a threat, whether that comes from an air raid siren or a ringtone or even a knock at the door.

“The Apocalypse Is Nigh!” Siren

Examples: the siren in Silent Hill, the commencement horn in The Purge.

There’s a category of scary sound that can’t be described any more effectively than … the noises you hear at the end of the world. Already alarming klaxons used to warn citizens about impending tsunamis or attack planes become even more harrowing when they signal the coming of creatures straight out of the abyss. Often hitting your ears with a combination of natural and mechanical noises, apocalypse sounds are meant to knock you on your ass.

Purge creator James DeMonaco told his sound team to model the now-infamous Purge commencement siren on the influential Tripod call from Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds. The foundation for that mech call is actually organic, coming from the buzzing boom of a didgeridoo wood instrument — before all manner of sound-designing wizardry was applied to make it alien. (Sound designer Michael Babcock created the factory like sounds of the Tripods moving by combining manipulated pneumatics, noises from roller coasters and moving gears, and the groans emitted by evaporating dry ice, all sequenced in 3/4 time.)

Knocks, Knocks, Knocks

Examples: the single, terrifying knock on the door from The Strangers, the house attacks in The Haunting (1963 and 1999), all the pounding in Knock at the Cabin.

One of the greatest tricks of horror cinema is taking the thing meant to keep us safe — the walls of our own homes — and turning them into the tools for our destruction. In Robert Wise’s original Haunting, the occupants of Hill House are sieged by ghostly forces pounding on every wall and even the ceiling. Walls made of laminated wood flex as crew members behind them push against them on the other side, acting as angry spirits off camera. The relentless thrashing is so resonant yet sharp it sounds like metal pounding on wood, or like someone is shaking a sheet of thin metal. For the 1999 remake, sound designer Gary Rystrom created the movie’s various booms and crashes at houses scheduled for demolition. Rystrom and others went in and beat the hell out of walls and doors with baseball bats before layering those noises with the stock sounds of distant explosions and artillery detonations.

Phones From Hell

Examples: The living room phone in When A Stranger Calls (1979), the sorority house phone in Black Christmas (1974 and 2006), Casey’s call in Scream, the mobile chime in One Missed Call.

First horror movies ruined doors by making every creaky hinge an ultimatum, and in time they would come for our phones, allowing them to puncture silence at a harsh frequency. Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call features a mobile-phone ringtone that sounds like a cross between a Christmas carol and a haunted music box, and you can still find the early-aughts message boards where fans were scouring the internet for downloads they could use. Absolute maniacs.

Other Notable Cursed Objects

Nothing is safe in horror world, and the weaponizing of the mundane only reinforces the cruel reality that when you’re watching a scary movie, every sound is out to get you — even the clink of that benign little cup your girlfriend’s mom is holding.

A Garbage Disposal

Examples: the garbage disposal in Halloween: H20, the garbage disposal in Pulse (1988).

A pastime of horror filmmakers must be creating novel phobias. Who among us would drive behind a timber lorry after watching Final Destination 2? And is there anyone willing to reach down their hand to unstick a garbage disposal? There is an especially gruesome quality to the household garbage disposal, its gentle hum belying a truer purpose: rough-cut body horror. It is the wood chipper of kitchen tools.

Freddy Krueger’s Knives

Examples: Freddy Kreuger’s knives scraping a pipe in Nightmare on Elm Street.

A lot of disturbing sounds come from the insertion of objects into bodies, but the blades, hooks, farming equipment, and torture devices of horror movies take on their own menacing noises outside flesh. For Freddy’s blades in Elm Street, Foley artist Gary Hecker created razor-sharp sounds using two types of blades to create two different sound profiles. A machete produced the ringing blade sound, while surgical steel blades imparted a sharper pitch. Foley artist Marilee Yorston mixed her own version of a zhing below.

The Sounds in Silence

The ultimate counterweight to the cacophony of nerve shattering noises in horror movies is the secret weapon that sets them all up to be that much worse: silence, and the mundane yet terrifying sounds that live in it.

Bumps in the Night

Examples: the world of A Quiet Place, the woods in The Blair Witch Project, the clap-clap from the dark in The Conjuring, the cryptids in Willow Creek.

While The Blair Witch Project is probably the most iconic showcase for bump-in-the-night sounds in a spooky forest, Willow Creek takes the tactic of strategically snapping sticks and crackling dry brush to virtuoso heights. Director Bobcat Goldthwait stages a 22-minute scene that takes place entirely in a tent with the camera fixed in one position, creating an unbearably tense progression that lives entirely on the faces of the two protagonists as they react to sounds of the forest steadily closing in on them. Branches snap, wood knocks against wood, feet walk around outside crushing brittle leaves under them, mysterious moans drift in from the distance.

Lewton Buses

Example: the bus in Cat People, Church the cat appearing out of nowhere in Pet Sematary (1989), seemingly any cat in any horror movie.

In terms of jump scares in horror movies, the original Cat People really was that bitch. It gave us the iconic scene of Alice being pursued in the dark, which lead right into a startle so perfect that it gave a name to a whole category of frights that would come after. A Lewton Bus is whenever you have an interjecting fake-out scare. A thing — big or loud or jarring or all of the above — that prematurely pops the bubble of a silence stretched to its absolute limit of tension. It’s the valve release, but it’s not the main event. It’s just a diversion.

In Cat People, just when Alice seems sure she’ll be overtaken by whatever is after her, a bus rushes into the frame and assaults the audience with an auditory screech, but it amounts to no actual harm. Any time a cat jumps out of the darkness or a flock of birds descends from the rafters, and you mistake it for the killer — that is a Lewton Bus, the lawful evil of horror movie scares.

Stalker Steps

Examples: Irena in Cat People, Brad Dourif following the diner-goer in Night School.

Look in a Foley pro’s go bag and a few pairs of kicks are likely there, because in almost any movie you watch, someone almost always has to walk. A person’s gait and footfalls can be as specific as their voice, though, thus nailing a walk in a recording session is a performance on its own. The sound of quickening steps across the asphalt isn’t something that has to be invented by Foley artists to be scary, they just have to be painstakingly recreated. To do so, Foley artist Shaun Brennan says he keeps a suitcase full of shoes, nestled next to his wigs, a switchblade, and handcuffs.

Sudden Running

Examples: the nighttime bedroom invasion in Paranormal Activity, the dead sprint in Annabelle, the night jog in Get Out.

While the stalker’s steps slowly build up tension, the spontaneous sprint is like an adrenaline shot to the heart, with the speed of the footfalls mimicking your pulse as it spikes. When Annabelle Wallis sees the ghost of a little girl staring at her from the hall outside her room, you think that’s going to be the end of it. The door will swing shut and the girl will vanish, leaving everyone to wonder if it was a hallucination. But then out of nowhere, the little girl tears directly at Walls with no other sound or accompanying score — just the hollow, crescendoing sound of her feet thudding towards our heroine and us. Annabelle lifted the idea from Mario Bava’s Shock, and it worked so well that The Prodigy did it after Annabelle.

White Noise

Examples: the voices in the white noise in White Noise, the wobbly high-pitched ring of the haunted VHS tape in Ringu and The Ring, the TV in Poltergeist.

White noise is the combination of multiple frequencies across the spectrum of audible sound, each with the same level of intensity. This results in its constant, stable sound. In a less technical sense, white noise is also where evil lives! When Carol Anne sat herself directly in front of the TV in Poltergeist with only a snowy screen of white noise emanating from the box, moviegoers were unhinged. In the age of streaming devices, it’s harder to encounter white noise in the wild, which hopefully means we have closed up the hellmouth.

The Sounds of Horror