Given the elemental role sound plays in the medium of film, it is a shame that it is often skimmed over or entirely left out in much film analysis. As the nature of film is time based and audio-visual, sound is significant in the way it organises and contextualises the visuals into a continuum that you experience as a whole, thereby shaping the dynamics of narrative and drama. The images you see on screen are defined by the immersive body of sound in which they reside, in much the same way that the contours of an island are fashioned by the waters that surround it.
Horror movies, with their penchant for excess and theatricality, provide the most beguiling examples of this aural sculpting. For within horror movies, sound is employed hysterically and manically, rupturing our expectations and assumptions of it in a ferocious howl of experimentalism. The repercussions of this gesture is that the film’s visuals are dramatically engorged and demonically overridden by the hyperbolic acoustics, thus imbuing the imagery with the visceral tactility and alien ambience that we have come to expect from the horror genre. Whether it be the ear splitting scream of an unsuspecting murder victim, the foreboding drones resonating from a darkened basement, or the nauseating gurgle of blood erupting out of a body, the tonality and weight of its sound generates the terror of the horror film.
But where should we start such a formal analysis? To begin with, this short essay concedes to the fact that it cannot offer you a detailed overview of sound’s development in horror cinema; such a historicist task would require the length of a book or two. Instead, this essay will examine the sonic universe of a contemporary horror movie in order to show how it impacts and modulates the overall themes and effects produced within it. And that film will be Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018).
While the incorporation of metal and rock aesthetics in horror is nothing new, Mandy’s use of these musical genres is notable in the way they are rendered as abstract swathes of sound. This ethereal quality is partly achieved by the soundtrack’s lack of percussive instrumentation[i]. In traditional conceptions of rock and metal music, the drums act as the arena or stage for the dynamics of the varying instruments to play out on, thus grounding the music in a finite landscape of propulsive grooves, beats and tempos. By voiding this element, the idioms of metal and rock become untethered to any rhythmic stabilization and are left to amass within the soundtrack as undulating clouds of bass distortion and guitar fuzz. Like the pervasive tones of red and purple which saturate the visuals of the movie, the soundtrack’s amorphous reworking of metal and rock smothers the action in a suggestively doom-laden atmosphere. This cunningly layers Mandy’s familiar tale of bloody revenge with a disconcerting sense of otherness and fatalism, evoking a malign supernaturalism reminiscent of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft[ii] in the soundtrack’s groans and shrieks.
We first get a taste of this in one of the earlier scenes where we see the character Mandy reading a fictional pulp novel called Seeker of the Serpent alone in her room. The scene begins with a fleeting shot of the paperback carelessly sitting on top of a side table, as Mandy casually picks it up and reads it. However, the mundanity of this action is devastated by the domineering presence of the soundtrack, which subsumes the scene’s entire diegetic acoustics into its dense swell of subharmonic bass. The sequence is thus rendered eerily wraithlike: the space appears weightless, undefined and spectral as Mandy silently floats through it like a dispossessed phantom. The effect is both disorientating and disembodying. What this implies is that we are not psychoacoustically tied to Mandy’s experience of the world. Instead, the soundtrack syncs us to a strangely nonhuman perspective, as though we are inhabiting the inner soundscape of an alien voyeur who is watching (or perhaps guiding) the events of the film from afar. In this sense, the soundtrack’s rumbling growls and deafening silences position Mandy less as a person and more as an object that is being hauntingly observed by an omnipresent ‘other’.
This ghostly presence which defines the film’s sonic landscape can also be felt in the character’s textured vocalisations. From the hushed intonations of ‘did you hear that?’ to the hysterical screaming of ‘it’s behind you!’, the articulation of dialogue in horror is perhaps more important than the dialogue itself. While this trend certainly persists in Mandy, it diverts in the way the voices of different characters wildly mutate through the use of digital processers employed in postproduction.
In the same way a pop singer’s voice is stretched and amplified beyond its natural parameters via electronic remastering, the voices in Mandy appear similarly unrestrained by their bodily containers. Utterances seem to twist and morph by their own volition, unfurling within the film as nebulous bands of rippling sound. The result is entirely unnatural and nonhuman. Consequently, the characters appear curiously severed from their own voice: they do not speak but, instead, are being spoken through. Akin to the unnerving phantasmagoria of puppet theatre, the character’s mismatched audio-vision ominously indicates that there is an external player hidden from our sight. It is this invisible figure who is the true performer, for they are the master puppeteer who controls and guides the action of the piece. But unlike puppet theatre, Mandy’s monstrous revoicing implies that its ‘concealed master’ is not human at all. Instead, this vocal discord invokes an entity that is noumenal, threatening and alien. This speaks to the Lovecraftian core of Mandy’s aural universe: which is that lurking behind all notions of representation is a monstrous ‘other’.
If one reads Mandy purely in terms of its story and characters, they are unlikely to go beyond standard humanism and dull literary interpretations. Yet the marvel of film music is the way it can generate varying levels of meaning within the picture, shattering the obvious into shards of wonder. On one level, Mandy is a gory tale of revenge: a man seeks to bring down those who wronged him with a God-like wrath. However, the film’s sonic landscape transmutes this familiar narrative into a much more sinister scenario; one where all of humanity is ominously directed by an unseeable force.
You can stream Mandy on Amazon:
[i] However, drums do make an appearance at approximately an hour and forty four minutes into the movie.
[ii] Howard Philips Lovecraft was an American horror writer active between the years of 1917-1937. His narratives continually depict how the course of humanity is secretly influenced by nonhuman, alien entities (known within Lovecraft’s mythos as The Old Ones). His style came to be popularly referred to as cosmic horror.
Patrick Zaia is an artist, musician and writer based in Melbourne, Australia.
