This week we moved on to discussing a genre I consider one of my least favourite: horror. There are a small number of truly exceptional examples throughout film history, and some of my favourite films are horrors, but the general strike rate of the genre is incredibly poor. For every good horror film there seems to be ten bad ones.

Berberian Sound Studio, this week’s screening, is one of the good ones. I wish I had watched it ahead of time and didn’t wait to see it in class — it’s essentially one long exploration of the visceral effect of sound design and construction in the horror film, which is what I based my Project Brief 2 sketch on. I wanted to reckon with the function and effect of silence in horror, and at first I tried experimenting with literal silence, but quickly learned that that is actually just confusing and would cause an audience to wonder if my piece had finished early. So I kept building it up more and more with sound effects — atmospheric noise, crickets, twigs, a low hum — and, surprisingly, even though I kept adding more sound to the mix it still felt like “silence” in the context of the sketch.

Berberian Sound Studio does the same thing (but, obviously, on a much more sophisticated level) by showing Gilderoy (Toby Jones) at work as a sound mixer in a giallo horror studio. He laboriously and intricately layers a cacophony of seemingly unrelated sounds — knives going into cabbages, lightbulbs rubbing against metal springs, water frying in a pan — to construct a final product that an audience would accept as a suite of genuine live sound effects without batting an eyelid.

I’ve often thought about the effect sound has on horror, and suspected that sound is the element through which mainstream modern horror films most often cause fear and surprise in their audience. Jump scares, which reached the zenith/nadir of their use in the 2000s, are rendered almost completely ineffectual with the sound turned down. I first noticed this when watching the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at home late at night. I had seen the film at the cinema earlier, and experienced a high number of significant scares, but at home with the sound turned down relatively low the effect had been completely lost. Play a really loud, really abrupt sound and people will jump.

This is a subject discussed in this week’s reading¹, in which film scholar Rick Altman is quoted as saying “the construction of a uniform-level soundtrack, eschewing any attempt at matching sound scale to image scale, thus takes its place alongside the thirties’ numerous invisible image editing devices within the overall strategy of hiding the apparatus itself”. This suggests that, traditionally, sound was supposed to be invisible, just accepted by the audience as an inherent accompaniment to whatever is being presented visually. Clearly this is no longer the case, and dramatic changes in the characteristics of sound (loudness, timbre, perspective, etc.) are often exploited to achieve a particular effect — and this is especially true in horror.