Sounds scary!
FEARSOME DINOSAURS? IT WAS JUST A JACK RUSSELL!
JURASSIC BARK: The sound of mating tortoises was used to recreate velociraptor calls, while some of the movie’s T-rex noises involved the barks of a Jack Russell dog.
A hatching dino egg was an ice-cream cone being crumpled, while the sound as a monster munched a human was actually a horse eating a corncob.
WOOKIEE WONDER: In the original Star Wars films, Chewbacca’s holler came from mixing the sounds of a bear and a walrus.
The noise of TIE fighters combined trumpeting elephants with a car driving on wet tarmac, while the lightsaber came from interference between a microphone and TV set. EYE OPENER: In the 1960s Star Trek TV series featuring William Shatner, the famous swoosh of the automatic doors on the USS Enterprise came from simply taking a piece of paper out of an envelope.
KEY NOTE: Doctor Who’s Tardis on the BBC’s sci-fi show was given its distinctive time-travelling noise by running a door key up and down a length of piano wire.
A jangling bunch of keys was also used on the set of the 1960 film Spartacus to recreate the sound of soldiers marching. MONEY SHOT: The chilling cracking sound of a possessed girl’s head turning 360 degrees in 1973 horror film The Exorcist was achieved by merely bending a leather wallet full of credit cards close to a microphone. BIG HIT: The 1999 flick Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt, had the crew whacking baseball bats against chicken carcasses filled with walnuts to fake the sound of punches hitting flesh and bone. FRUITFUL IDEA: To find a more authentic stabbing sound in Psycho’s famous shower scene, the director of the 1960 classic, Alfred Hitchcock, knifed different kinds of melon. OUT OF THIS WORLD: In Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the sounds of him moving had a squelchy quality achieved with jelly in a wet towel and popcorn in a bag. HAVE YOU HORDE? The cries of baby elephant seals were used for the sounds orcs make in the Lord Of The Rings films. I IANA GER: For 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, a rolling boulder was actually a Honda Civic driving slowly over gravel.