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. Read more
