How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear

Why sound does the frightening

A frightening image has to be looked at, understood and judged. A sound arrives first. It reaches the ear whether or not anyone is paying attention, it comes from all directions in a theater, and it can start a physical reaction, a flinch or a held breath, before the mind has decided what it heard. Film sound people have long understood this, and horror is the genre that depends on it most. A film can hide its monster for an hour, but it cannot hide a floorboard that creaks in the next room.

Sound also tells the audience how to feel about an image. The same shot of an empty hallway is calm with soft room tone and menacing with a faint, steady drone. The editor and sound crew are not just decorating the picture. They decide where the audience should look, when to relax and when to expect the worst. Many of the best-known scares in this library work because of what was heard, and this article follows the main tools of the trade: silence, low frequencies, music, noises from offscreen, sounds built in a studio, and the final mix.

Silence as a weapon

Silence is not the absence of sound design but one of its strongest forms. When a sound drops out, the audience starts to listen harder, and the smallest noise becomes loud. Directors use silence to set up a scare, but also to make a quiet scene feel unsafe. In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a famous Steadicam shot follows Danny as he pedals his tricycle through the hotel. The soundtrack changes with the floor: it rumbles when the wheels roll over wood, and goes nearly silent when they move onto carpet. Each change is a small jolt, and the viewer learns to dread the next one.

A Quiet Place (2018), directed by John Krasinski, builds an entire film on the idea. Its family lives among creatures that hunt by sound, so they communicate in sign language and walk carefully. One of the children, Regan, is deaf, played by Millicent Simmonds. The film premiered at South by Southwest on March 9, 2018, opened on April 6, earned about $341 million worldwide, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing. The film asks the theater audience to follow the same rules as the family, since any noise in the room becomes part of the experience.

There is also a risk in silence. It only works if the viewer has already been made to expect sound. A film that is quiet from the start offers nothing to contrast with, which is why good horror alternates between noise and quiet, building the baseline before it pulls the floor out.

Low frequencies and the body

Low-pitched sound reaches the body as well as the ears. Subwoofers and large theater systems can shake a seat, and filmmakers use deep rumbles to produce unease without the audience knowing why. There is a long-running claim that infrasound, sound below the usual limit of human hearing of about 20 hertz, can cause fear or even ghost sightings. The evidence is thinner than the legend. In a 1998 paper, Vic Tandy and Tony Lawrence suggested that a tone of about 19 hertz might explain some reports of haunting, after Tandy felt anxious in a supposedly haunted laboratory and traced a vibration to an extractor fan.

A 2003 experiment exposed about 700 people to music that contained a near-inaudible 17-hertz tone, and about 22 percent reported unease, sorrow, chills or fear. The researcher Richard Wiseman said the results suggested that low frequencies can produce odd experiences without being consciously noticed. Reviewers of the evidence still call the link between infrasound and fear speculative and based on limited studies, and popular claims like the “brown note” have been tested and not confirmed.

For filmmakers the practical point is simpler. A low drone under a quiet scene, a rumble that is felt more than heard, or a sudden low hit can raise tension in a theater, whatever the exact science. The best examples are subtle. If a viewer cannot say what changed, the effect has worked.

Score and source music

Film scholars divide sound into two kinds. Diegetic sound comes from the world of the story: a radio, a footstep, a character humming. Non-diegetic sound, usually the score, is heard only by the audience. Horror plays with the boundary. A song on a car radio can be a bit of ordinary life in one shot and an ironic comment in the next, and a score can suddenly stop, leaving the characters exposed. In Halloween, the radio in Annie's car plays Blue Öyster Cult's “(Don't Fear) The Reaper,” a piece of ordinary background music, while the score belongs to the film's killer in a way that the characters never hear.

That score was written and performed by John Carpenter himself. He has said he can play almost any keyboard but cannot read or write music, and he wrote the music after a test screening in which the film was judged not scary. The main theme is a piano melody in a complex 5/4 pattern, written as 10/8. Carpenter has said it took about three days to compose and record, though he has also given a much shorter figure. The end credits bill him as the Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra, a joke, and the San José State University professor Dan Wyman helped with the music. Because it is so simple, the theme can be repeated almost without limit, and it works as a sign of approach even when the frame holds nothing.

Bernard Herrmann and the all-strings score

Psycho is the standard example of a score that is also a character. Bernard Herrmann wrote it for a string orchestra only, and said that gave a “black-and-white sound” to match the black-and-white photography. Alfred Hitchcock first wanted the shower scene to play without music. Herrmann disagreed, they screened the scene both ways, and Hitchcock kept the music. Hitchcock admitted at the time that the film depended heavily on Herrmann's music for its tension. In 2005 the American Film Institute ranked the score fourth on its list of the 25 greatest film scores.

The score's influence is easy to hear. Its shrieking violins in the murder cue have been quoted and borrowed for decades. Danny Elfman's cue “Stolen Bike” for Pee-wee's Big Adventure echoes Herrmann's “The Murder,” Busta Rhymes sampled the score in his 1998 song “Gimme Some More,” and the 1998 remake of the film included Elfman's reworkings. The partnership between Hitchcock and Herrmann ended with Torn Curtain in 1966, when Hitchcock wanted a more pop-influenced score, Herrmann refused to change his approach and the music was replaced.

Herrmann's example shows how a restricted palette can be a strength. Strings alone can be shrill, warm, sad or terrifying, and a single instrument group gave the film a consistent tone that a full orchestra might have scattered.

Music that is not music: The Exorcist and The Shining

Some films turn to modern concert music or to sound design that blurs the boundary. William Friedkin's The Exorcist has only about 17 minutes of music across its two-hour running time, mostly heard during scene transitions, and Friedkin described his intent as understated music. He rejected a score by Lalo Schifrin, and Bernard Herrmann declined the job after seeing a rough cut. Friedkin used pieces by Penderecki and Webern, original music by Jack Nitzsche, and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, a record he found in the studio's music library; the studio then bought the rights. Oldfield's album became hugely popular after the film used it.

The Shining, similarly, relies on existing modernist works that Kubrick chose himself. These include Ligeti's “Lontano,” Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and several pieces by Penderecki, with electronic music by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind. Kubrick cut some of their cues, which left Carlos disillusioned. Music editor Gordon Stainforth was noted for fitting the existing recordings to the picture with remarkably precise synchronization. The effect is a score that feels less like accompaniment than like a pressure, a hostile weather system over the hotel.

Even the early days of cinema made such choices. Nosferatu had an original score by Hans Erdmann, played by an orchestra at the Berlin premiere, but most of it is now lost and later musicians have supplied several replacement scores, from a 1990s reconstruction to many newer versions. The 1931 Dracula had no original score at all and opened with Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Both films show that a horror film can feel very different depending on what is heard under it.

Voices, creatures and the sounds of monsters

A monster is often defined as much by its voice as by its look. In The Exorcist, the demon's voice was performed by Mercedes McCambridge, who reportedly ate raw eggs, drank whiskey and smoked to rough up her delivery. The studio did not credit her until a Screen Actors Guild arbitration. The sound crew, Ron Nagle, Doc Siegel, Gonzalo Gavira and Bob Fine, layered animal noises, including bees, dogs, hamsters and pigs, into the demon's voice. The head-turning sound was made by twisting a leather wallet. The sound process took about four months, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Sound, awarded to Robert Knudson and Chris Newman.

In Alien, Jerry Goldsmith's score was shaped by a tug-of-war. Ridley Scott disliked Goldsmith's first main title, so Goldsmith rewrote it, and Scott and editor Terry Rawlings also re-edited some cues to match a temporary score, some of which stayed in the final film. Rawlings, who also served as sound effects editor, used a passage from Howard Hanson's Second Symphony for the end credits. The creature's sounds were supplied by Percy Edwards, a British voice artist famous for bird calls on television. The poster's tagline, “In space no one can hear you scream,” is a reminder that the film's sound design is about the gap between what a human feels and what space allows.

In Japan, Hideo Nakata's Ringu was scored by Kenji Kawai, who worked closely with Nakata and the effects team. The sound crew layered many separate audio tracks, about 50 each for background and effects, and mixed four different telephone sounds together for the phone effects. The result is a score that blends into the room's electronic hum, so that a ringing phone or a television's static becomes part of the threat.

Offscreen sound and the sound of a low budget

What is heard but not seen is one of horror's oldest tricks. The audience imagines the source, and the imagination is usually worse than the picture. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a case where noise carries the film. Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell are credited with the music, but the film is better known for its sensory overload. Critic Jesse Stommel has written that it engages viewers through the senses, citing its “auditory pandemonium.” The background radio, with broadcasts describing grisly crimes around Texas, is a subtle touch that fills in the world beyond the frame.

Low budgets push filmmakers toward creativity. For Night of the Living Dead, most of the music was taken from earlier films, including the 1959 science-fiction picture Teenagers from Outer Space and the television series Wanted Dead or Alive, plus a piece from The Hideous Sun Demon (1959). Reusing library cues was a common way for a tiny production to afford a score. In found footage films, the camera's microphone is the only sound source, which is why a thump in the dark or a voice off camera is so effective: the characters hear it, the audience hears it, and neither can see what made it.

Foley, ADR and the studio mix

Most of the sounds in a finished film were not recorded on the set. Foley, named after Jack Donovan Foley, who worked at Universal Studios from 1914 and helped add sound to Universal's Show Boat when sound arrived, is the craft of recreating everyday sound effects in a studio while watching the film. Performers called Foley walkers or steppers walk on different surfaces in a room of floor materials, and cloth is rubbed near the microphone to mimic clothing. Automated dialogue replacement, or ADR, is the separate process of re-recording lines. Both happen in post-production.

Horror uses Foley for the sounds that cannot be recorded for real. Sources describing the craft say that frozen romaine lettuce can stand in for the crack of a bone, and a water-soaked rusty hinge makes a convincing creak. Thunder sheets mimic thunder when bent and shaken. These are common Foley tricks, not documented details from any one film, but they show the approach: gather everyday objects, perform them in time with the picture and record them close.

The final step is the mix. Dialogue, music, effects and Foley are balanced on separate tracks, and decisions about levels are decisions about fear. A mix may let a quiet footstep rise above an orchestral hit, or let the music duck suddenly under a whisper. Because horror often asks the audience to hear small things, the mix is where the effect is finalized.

Try it yourself

A simple experiment shows how much of a scene is sound. Pick a scene from Halloween or Psycho and watch it twice, once with the sound muted and once with the screen covered. With the sound off, the image is often calm. With the picture covered, the scene is still frightening. Then listen for the layers: the room tone, the footsteps, the score and the sounds that seem to come from outside the frame.

Related entries

• Found Footage
• Halloween
• Psycho
• The Birth of Horror Cinema: A Short Timeline

Sources and further reading

• Halloween (1978 film), Wikipedia
• Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia
• Psycho (1960 film), Wikipedia
• The Exorcist (film), Wikipedia
• The Shining (film), Wikipedia
• A Quiet Place (film), Wikipedia
• Infrasound, Wikipedia
• Alien (film), Wikipedia
• Ring (film), Wikipedia
• Foley (filmmaking), Wikipedia
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wikipedia
• Night of the Living Dead, Wikipedia
• Nosferatu, Wikipedia
• Dracula (1931 English-language film), Wikipedia