Spooky Sounds – What Makes Horror Movies Sound Creepy

Sound commanded a crucial place in the horror genre, well before the age of movies. Mid-19th century horror writers Bram Stoker and Edgar Allen Poe made sounds resonate loudly in our imagination through masterful descriptions that drove the suspense in their stories. Those visceral and primal sounds have such a natural creepiness to them that they quickly found their way from the book to the screen and speakers. Squeaking doors, breathing sounds and heartbeats, the cry of a distant wolf, footsteps, crackling sounds of leaves and dirt, thunderstorms, or the white noise of a broken television, … Why are these the trademark sounds of the horror genre? Let’s explore…

Finding That One Thump That Scares
It was the sound designers in theater productions that truly translated the eeriness of sounds from the script page to the stage performance. They had the opportunity to test what worked well in the audience’s ear and tweak their sound effects accordingly. They quickly found that realism and truthfulness to actual sounds were not essential. The crushing, squishy sound of a bludgeoned melon stirred the imagination of the audience more than anything else when depicting the bashing of a character’s head on stage. It was this way that they also discovered the hair rising power of certain sounds like music boxes, out-of-tune pianos, and other droning, ethereal, or repetitive sounds.

Conjuring Sounds From The Ether
The Theremin, perhaps the first electronic instrument, invented by Leon Theremin in 1929, never became a popular instrument in commercial music. It did however find a prominent place in horror soundtracks and other high-suspense movie scenes for its trademark eerie sounds. The instrument, played without physical contact by the musician, produces a mysterious sound that is sometimes likened to a woman’s humming, the soft howling of a distant wind, or the swelling sound of a steel guitar. No wonder it found its way into timeless masterpieces of the horror genre, such as Hitchcock’s Spellbound, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and, more recently, Monster House and First Man. Horror music composers usually look for musical effects such as tremolo, trills, and glissando to create a haunting and eerie effect. The Theremin produces all these effects in an extremely wide spectrum, unequaled by any other instrument known to man.

Primal Sounds
Horror movies traditionally use primal sounds to great effect. These are sounds that stimulate our autonomic nervous system and engage our survival instincts. Our bodies were meant to react to these sounds because our hearing is a multidirectional sense that detects danger from anywhere around us, as opposed to sight that can only scan what’s in front of our eyes. Sounds from the wind, footsteps, crackling twigs, or any other sounds that announce the approaching danger without being able to see it, command our bodies for all kinds of reactions, from chills to goosebumps.

Horror movies are very much a visual art in terms of storytelling. But their soundtracks –the music and sound effects– connect with a much deeper and visceral side of the audience, making sound perhaps the most important ingredient in the horror film genre.