How Sound Is Used To Create Suspense In Horror Movies
How do you convey the presence or someone or something in a scene without the audience actually seeing it? That’s the special challenge of horror-movie sound design. In this episode of “Movies Insider,” we visited Alchemy Post Sound, the Foley studio behind “The Invisible Man” and a slew of other horror projects, to find out how horror movies use sound to play with viewers’ minds. We had one of Alchemy’s founders, Foley artist Leslie Bloome, break down a few scenes from “The Invisible Man” as case studies, recreating how his team made sounds as subtle and detailed as a faucet squeak or a faint wind chime. He also showed us how Foley artists create a range of classic horror-movie suspense sounds, from unsettling creaks to mysterious gusts of wind, and explained how all these carefully crafted sounds come together to ratchet up the tension in horror scenes, making climactic moments feel larger than life.
