If you want to scare others, sound is a very useful tool. You probably know the classic joke where you hide behind a door or closet and wait for the victim to pass.
When the time is right and the victim’s shoulders are turned, you jump out and scream. It works every time.
There are also historical examples of the use of sound as a psychological component, such as in rituals and wars.
The so-called deadly whistles of the Aztecs produce an unusually unpleasant sound, reminiscent of a hoarse death cry. These whistles may have been used ritually or even in battle to scare the enemy.
During World War II, the German armed forces installed sirens on their bombers. Sirens emitted loud, shrill sounds as planes swooped in to bomb or strafe the enemy. The goal was to intimidate the enemy and break his morale.
In this post, we’re not going to look at deadly whistles, German military sirens, or pranks, but rather how sound works in horror movies and why different types of sounds scare us.
Without sound, horror movies are just plain boring
Horror movies show how effective sound can be in evoking emotions and it’s hard to imagine a horror movie without sound.
Spielberg’s shark-infested classic Shark wouldn’t be the same without the iconic soundtrack associated with the shark’s arrival in the film.
And if you watch Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “The Shining” without sound, the film loses a lot of its effect.
Both “Jaws” and “The Shining” sounds are used to create both a menacing atmosphere and shock effects.
Think, for example, of the famous scene from the movie “The Shining” in which little Danny Torres rides a bicycle through the empty corridors of the hotel and arrives at the door of the haunted room 237.
In this scene, we hear the sound of Danny’s bicycle crossing the wooden floors and carpets, as the background music slowly gets louder in the background.
The background music sounds disturbing and contains disturbing elements that are perceived as unpleasant. They clearly indicate that everything is not as it should be. If you watch the clip with audio, it’s extremely creepy, but if you turn off the audio, it’s just plain boring.
The sound makes us jump with fear
When horror movies create shocking effects, such as when the scary character suddenly appears on the screen, sound is usually the main element that makes us jump.
Usually the film builds up to the actual shock, often consisting of eerie background music followed by a very loud sound when the actual shock occurs.
For example, in the movie “Jaws” there is a scene where a shark expert dives into a shipwreck and finds a very large shark tooth in a hole in the wreck.
The music of the strings in the background is disturbing again. As viewers, we know there is danger. Suddenly, a pale, severed and partially dissolved human head appears in the hole. It’s a repulsive sight, but it’s the loud, screeching sound of the violin that really provides the shock.
The screams indicate danger
Screams and scream-like sounds, in particular, play a big part in horror movies, and there are good biological reasons for this.
Researchers have shown that the scream has unique acoustic properties that make it extremely effective as a distress signal.
Many animals scream when they are in danger. The scream is the result of the animal straining the vocal cords and producing what is known as a non-linear and therefore unpredictable, rough, discordant and jarring sound.
Screams also have a much broader frequency spectrum which includes the higher frequencies that the vocal cords can produce and are therefore more irregular and dissonant than speech.
The scream pierces all other sounds and immediately mobilizes our attention. It is a fundamental biological signal that tells us that someone is in danger and we instinctively respond to it.
Screaming queens
One of the legendary scream queens (actresses who specifically master the art of screaming) is Jamie Lee Curtis, who, for example, screams for her life in John Carpenter’s 1978 trending film Halloween, where she is hunted down. by the iconic killer Michael Myers.
Also, the music in horror movies can mimic a scream. One of the most famous examples in film history is the so-called shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho movie.
In this scene, the main character (played by Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother) is stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. We hear her death scream causing fear, but we also hear composer Bernard Herrmann’s famous violins, which sound like a piercing scream. People perceive these sounds as extremely unpleasant precisely because they resemble natural warning signs, just like Aztec death whistles.
Menacing sounds: the monster is coming
Very low sounds also often appear in horror movies, both in background music and sound effects. They can appear when a scary monster roars – the monster’s roar is almost always relatively low.
If Godzilla was screaming like a mouse, then the monster would be hard to take seriously. This is because we instinctively associate low frequency sounds with danger. The larger the animal, the lower the sound it can make and, in the animal kingdom, size is often associated with superiority and therefore threat.
A very large gorilla is more dangerous than a small gorilla. Some filmmakers have even experimented with so-called infrasound, which is a sound at such a low frequency that we don’t consciously record it.
We humans can hear sounds in the frequency range of about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but unconsciously we perceive even lower sounds.
When the violent film “Irreversible” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, several members of the audience passed out. This could be due to the fact that director Gasper Noé incorporated extremely low frequency sound into the film.
Sounds that rapidly increase in intensity can also scare us and are often used in horror films, as nerve-wracking scenes that cause shock.
A soft background sound that quickly gets louder can give the impression that something dangerous is on the way.
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