National Post (National Edition)
THE SOUNDS OF HORROR.
SOUND DESIGNERS USE INTUITION AND SCIENCE TO TRY TO SCARE MOVIE AUDIENCES
‘But the piranhas …” “What about the goddam piranhas?” “They’re eating the guests, sir.”
In Joe Dante’s fun, spoofy homage to the monster-onthe-loose genre, Piranha (1978), you barely see the killer fish. But you surely hear them, and the sound is simultaneously amusing and terrifying. In the film’s climactic attack, the frenzied buzzing of the fish gains momentum as swimmers scream and splash, clamouring to escape the mutant piranhas.
A tale of science gone awry and a subtle critique of the Vietnam War, the B movie opens on a pair of hikers taking a dip in a pool at an abandoned military test site. Unbeknownst to them, the pool is an oversized fish tank housing an engineered species of demonic piranha with an unquenchable thirst for human blood.
Private investigator Maggie Mckeown (Heather Menzies-urich), who is hired to find the missing teenagers, ends up at the site with local alcoholic loner Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman). They encounter wild-eyed scientist Dr. Hoak (Kevin Mccarthy), a struggle ensues and Maggie drains the pool, unwittingly flushing the “razorteeth” downriver in the direction of a summer camp and lakeside resort.
Panic, as you might have guessed, ensues.
Given the carnivorous beasts were actually rubber puppet fish attached to sticks in the low-budget masterpiece, it’s no surprise that visually, they appear primarily in silhouette. Dante used quick cuts in close-up only when the fish struck, the water clouded with sanguine corn syrup simulating spilled blood. No doubt, the optical limitations of the threat made the auditory elements all the more important.
The anxiety-inducing drone of the piranhas’ rafts of minuscule, razor-sharp teeth tearing through human flesh is as scary today as it was when I first watched the film decades ago. The sound traumatized me so much as a kid that I was convinced the tiny South American fish would somehow make their way into my coastal B.C. town’s waters. (Unlike actual piranhas, which live in fresh water, the mutants in the film had adapted water, too.)
The layered hum the shoal emits when overwhelming its prey sounds like a swarm of mechanical bees — a parallel all the more apparent now that I know its source. In the director’s commentary for a 2004 DVD release of the film, Dante revealed they achieved the chilling piranha sound effect using a device responsible for striking fear in the hearts of many: the dental drill.
Offset by Pino Donaggio’s orchestral score, which ranges from tense to ominous to sober in the aftermath of the attacks, sound design (especially the feeding frenzy effect, which presumably was created by foley artist Velue Yewdall) is central to Piranha’s memorable impact.
Of course, this isn’t unique to the film Steven Spielberg once called “the best of the Jaws rip-offs." From creaking floorboards and howling wind to rattling chains and groans and to salt moans, creative use of sound in horror films heightens suspense, dread and terror. Sound — including the absence of it — is inseparable from the genre.
Whether snapping broccoli stems, squishing Jell-o or tearing rotisserie chicken carcasses limb from limb, sound designers exercise different creative muscles in support of story and the director’s vision, says Shane Rees, head of the sound design department at Vancouver Film School. “It’s … a psychoacoustic effect. You’re using normalized sounds to draw (people) in and then we can manipulate you and create the fight or flight feeling inside of you to really enhance that experience for the viewer,” he explains.
A primary principle in eliciting this response is dynamics, Rees says, or how quiet or loud a given sound is. He gives the example of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which is such a celebrated song, in part, because of the interplay between its soft verses and strong choruses. The dynamic range makes it exciting, which captures and holds our attention.
Horror movies induce goosebumps by employing similar techniques: drawing the audience in with subdued, sparse soundscapes and then walloping them with booming, discordant sounds. An extreme sense of unease also can be created by manipulating perception of silence, as in John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018), where sound is central to the story as a family attempts to elude monsters with hypersensitive hearing.
The film is hushed, but far from silent. It’s nearly dialogue-free, but sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn crafted an impactful soundscape that dwells in the dynamics of commonplace, ambient sounds. The stripped-down nature of the film amplifies small noises, giving them greater weight.
“When you pull sound out, you make the viewer engage … There’s a tendency in movies, TV shows or video games to just constantly (pack) it full of sound. So it loses its effect after a while: there’s sound after sound after sound after sound,” Rees says. “When sound people are given the opportunity to, you’ll find the good ones will actually pull sound out to draw the viewer in. And from a horror/thriller standpoint, then hit them hard with a sound that’s going to make them feel something scary.”
These terror-inducing sounds are often thunderously loud but some of the most archetypal examples rely on jarring dissonance, such as the unforgettable violin screech in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). But why are some sounds so effective at signalling primal fear, and not others?
If a blood-curdling scream or sound effect in a horror movie sends chills down your spine, chances are very good that it “contains high energy between 50 and 200 Hertz (sound wave cycles per second) of temporal modulation rate,” Pascal Belin and Robert J. Zatorre wrote in Current Biology in response to a 2015 New York University study. This characteristic is dubbed auditory roughness — or how quickly a sound shifts in loudness — and is comparable in visual terms to the whirling flash of a strobe light. Typical speech patterns don’t fluctuate very much (between four and five Hertz), Luc Arnal, lead author of the study, told Reuters at the time. Screams, on the other hand, “can modulate very fast”: between 30 and 150 Hertz.
Arnal found that the amygdala — a set of neurons in the brain’s temporal lobe, which plays a key role in processing emotional reactions — is exceptionally sensitive to auditory roughness and dissonant tones. This helps explain why screams and other sounds operating within the same frequency range are so disquieting. And while Arnal pointed to improved alarm sounds as a potential application of his findings, what his research and others like it could mean for sound design in scary movies is a lot more thrilling.
“(In horror films), it’s about triggering these innate responses in the human psyche to scare (people) and to make them feel uneasy, and remember: ‘That didn’t make me feel good,’” says Rees. “If done correctly, we can play with it and really use it to enhance that engagement and put that viewer right in there … And hopefully scare the s--t out of them.”
GOOD (SOUND PEOPLE) WILL ACTUALLY PULL SOUND OUT TO DRAW THE VIEWER IN.