the movement of the horror soundtrack from background to figure

The weird horror of mechanized sound. A causality of cinematic accompaniment and the movement of the horror soundtrack from background to figure.



Horror film soundtracks require an uncomplicated sound that disturbs the
audience viscerally rather than interest them intellectually. This seemingly simple sound is scientifically termed nonlinear vocalization. The “nonlinear” referring
to a natural sound made by an animal or person under duress, such as a shriek or
cry. “By their very nature, vocalizations containing nonlinearities may sound harsh
and are somewhat unpredictable; observations that are consistent with them being particularly evocative to those hearing them.” (UCLA professor, Daniel T. Blumstein) Thus the composers began to single out these types of sounds to elicit a “jump” from the audience watching a Horror film. Historically these compositions were created using various instruments and later, technology to create a specific otherworldly sound found only in Horror themed films. Many strange and unique machines would be designed by composers for the sole purpose of making never before heard tones.
The science and futuristic craft of instruments such as the Theremin, the Vocoder, Synthesizer and the Trautonium were created and utilized. These modern machines parallel the rise of machines in the 20th century and were able to manufacture the anxiety felt by the viewer. An anxiety, of not only a terrifying cinematic plot and a nonlinear soundtrack but of a direct fear of machines. The mechanized tones helped to define the phobias of “ a new world characterized by a rationale of industrial, technological and economic determinism “ (from “Configuring The Monster “ by
Paul Wells.) The phobia is a Heideggerian, a strategy of protection against contamination by technics (the non-essential technological aspect of technics)
In “ Of Spirit, Heidegger and The Question “Jacques Derrida analyzes Heidigger’s
fear of both machines and the idea of “ Geist “ or spirit. This fear of contamination
by the “thinkable essence “ of technology is one that underlies the movement of
composers and later visual artists to utilize the very thing that disturbs the viewer.This voice of a technology ghost created by composers, may have been an inadvertent by-product of the machines themselves. It is these weird tones that
did, along with a nonlinear composition disturb those that want to “ oppose the inhuman “.


This vision of a new technologically advanced, urban dystopia is depicted clearly
in the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang. In the film the mad scientist Rotwang renders
his anxiety and repression into a corporeal form. The form is the female android
“ Maria “ she is a technological marvel who embodies his desire to speak out against the oppression of the modern age. The robot, Maria dances to a soundtrack that only she and the viewers of the film can hear, as the film itself is silent. A soundtrack was scored by Gottfried Huppertz, which had to be played live by a pianist. This film, while not essentially a horror film, depicts the concepts of technology, oppression and fear. One of which is generally considered a typical theme of the horror genre.What of the other two ideas: oppression and technology? The Scientist, Rotwang shows us that these ideas are just as terrfying to the viewer and will eventually propel the concept of horror as sound. Rotwang is a modern composer, a fictional precursor to other great and very real Germanic composers. These two composers were to create the future sound of horror and influence both directors and composers for more than 40 years. They were Krysztof Penderecki and Oscar Sala.


Krzysztof Penderecki was born in Poland nearly a decade after Metropolis was released. Penderecki was most famously known for his composition “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima”, but it is his work on the 1968 fantasy film “ The Saragossa Manuscript “ that inspired future film composers. The film contained a highly experimental electro acoustic score, which was recorded at the now infamous, Polish Radio Experimental Studio. “ Penderecki was already pushing the envelope of conventional musical notation. “ Taking the raw sounds, if not the structuralist aesthetic, of Darmstadtian high-modernism as his starting point, he fashioned a remarkable repertoire of experimental orchestration techniques. “ (from “ Arks & Labyrinths” by Nicholas Reyland) For many listeners, these works called into question the location or existence of a border between "music" and "noise." Yet despite Penderecki's flagrant disregard for instrumental tradition, his music of the 1960s and early 1970s actually achieved wide-ranging popularity. One can track his later influence on directors such as Stanley Kubrick who had Penderecki score
“ 2001 a Space Oddesy “. Kubrick whom I will discuss later, also actually sampled Penderecki’s music and composed parts of the soundtrack to his film the Shining with these samples. It is at this border between music & noise that Penderecki navigated and constructed the sound of horror. This new mechanical sound of horror can be heard in the 1965 Polish film “ The Saragossa Manuscript “directed by cinematic auteur, Wojciech Has. The Saragossa Manuscript while considered to be a fantasy film, contains within it a narrative thread of horror. This cautionary tale includes seductive devil women and two dead brothers. These scenes are scored with what was to become Penderecki’s signature. He utilized a battery of odd sounds; seemingly uncomposed they were created using an arcane method of hand cutting the magnetic tapes and adding electronic effects. These sounds while disorienting carry the viewer along through the foreign horrifying spaces. The Manuscript score contained many electronic techniques that would later be termed electro acoustic sound / music.


Oscar Sala at an early age studied music and composition in Germany. Learning to “ play “ a futuristic machine known as the Trautonium. Sala would later develop the Trautonium into the Mixtur-Trautonium. The Mixtur-Trautonium opened the field of sub-harmonics, as it was the early predecessor to the synthesizer. Subharmonic sounds are produced by dividing the frequency of the fundamental “undertones”, resulting in subharmonics. The Mixur-Trautonium allowed for the sound engineer
to create tones, pluck strings on the machine and then mix the two together. The sounds and compositions created on both machines were completely unique these weird screeching and eerie vibratory tones were a perfect background to surreal
landscapes or horrifying drama. The sound he had been creating in Germany came to the attention of director Alfred Hitchcock who hired Sala to create the sound of the
actual birds in his film “ The Birds “. Hitchcock loved what Sala created and asked him to score the entire picture. This score would propel Sala into the public eye, and later he received a cultural medal of honor. During the ceremony, the Minister of Cultural Affairs was said to have called Sala " the congenial creator of bird screams that could set one's teeth on the edge."


These two pioneers of horrifying sound machines directly inspired three directors
to not only sample their compositions, but to create soundtracks to their own films. They embraced the idea that horror was a sound outside the normal convention of traditional instruments, a sound that required new technology to create it. These directors embraced modern technology and the machines of their predecessors;
Penderecki and Sala. These directors changed the face of the horror film with cinematic technique and strict art direction of all areas of their films. I wish to discuss specific films that contain strong electro acoustic scores. These directors were; Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” , Dario Argento’s “ Suspiria “ and John Carpenter’s “ Halloween “.



The Shining, a story originally written by Stephen King is widely considered a
horror film, yet its characters exist in a state described by Tzvetan Todorov as
“ a hesitation between the marvelous and the uncanny “ ( from “ The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre” by Tzvetan Todorov). This hesitative state
of in-between-ness is also rendered into the accompanying soundtrack. The score
contains within it traditional classical music by: Hector Berloiz & Bela Bartok , a Tin Pan Alley composition and many samples of works by Krzysztof Penderecki that
were remixed by Stanley Kubrick. The main protagonist in the film “ Jack “ often
travels between worlds and thus the score follows him. We see Jack degenerate into
a psychotic killer in room 237 and we are terrified because of the frightening stringed score of penderecki’s “ The Awakening of Jacob “. Later, an unhinged Jack seeks solace in the haunted ballroom of the Overlook Hotel and he unwinds to “ It's All Forgotten Now ” by Ray Noble and His Orchestra. In these two scenes the main character exists in that realm of hesitation, a place between and the sonic accompaniment supports this. In his essay “ The Uncanny “ Sigmund Freud describes what we feel when confronted with a place between “ The ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; “. The choice of mostly archaic and non-digetic sounds by Kubrick places
the viewer within “ The Uncanny “. We cannot place what time period we are in,
we can’t comprehend what instruments are being played and thus we literally feel the presence of the uncanny. Kubrick was also obsessed with the “ ghost “ in the machine; this is one of the underlying themes of his cinematic opus “ 2001 A Space Odyssey “. The computer HAL 9000, literally suffers “an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility" (1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis, Stanley Kubrick) During the scenes in which the machine is terrifying the character “ Dave “ there is no soundtrack other than the machine itself.
Nothing hidden behind “ music “ just the real creepy toneless voice of a living computer. The Shining while not containing the obvious character of a computer,
has moments in which the characters speak like one. The child Danny has an “ invisible friend “ one which lives inside him, a ghost named “ Tony “. Tony’s voice
is machine-like, an emotionless monotone that attempts to calm Danny while he
hallucinates horrifying images. Tony is almost always accompanied in the film by
Penderecki’s music. The combination is lethal and numbingly scary, the audience is
subjected to all terrors simultaneously. Kubrick utilizes this arsenal of “ all fears “ and froths the audience’s subconscious.



The director John Carpenter while not directly influenced by Penderecki , is well known for his directorial prowess and famous soundtracks. Most notably in his film “ Halloween “ Carpenter beat out of a basic 5-4 rhythm for the title theme on a cheap 70’s synthesizer. It’s simplicity mimicking a frightened human heartbeat. This “ heartbeat “ would become a musical signature of his films. Carpenter composed sixteen out of his nineteen film soundtracks , often performing them as well on digital instruments. The distinct trademarks found within his film scores leave no doubt that Carpenter inhabits a realm in which he is the sole occupant. “ In examining the marking characteristics in the music of John Carpenter, adjectives constantly appear and reappear when describing the sounds one hears. Expressions like pounding, driving, pulsing, haunting, bursting, crashing, slashing, racing, and floating, are all experienced in Carpenter's scores.” (from “Killing His Contemporaries: Dissecting The Musical Worlds Of John Carpenter” by Daniel & Seth Nelson) Carpenter also often relies on the sound of silence and natural sounds within a scene to narrate the action-taking place. In Halloween we hear , the wind, girls talking in class, cars driving by which in their naturalness offer a counterpoint to the horrifying sound that Michael Meyers doesn’t make. He often appears to his victims in total silence, he has no dialogue and this makes his silent mask face even more terrifying. In an interview Carpenter commented, "Someone once told me that music, or the lack of it, can make you see better. I believe it." When Carpenter presents the world from Michael Meyers p.o.v we only hear his ragged breathing, no music is necessary. The concept of “ stalker “ which is presented in this film, is that of an individual who waits, hides and then kills his “ prey “ . The theme to Halloween while mimicking a heartbeat also contains this chord progression of waiting, waiting , then crescendo then it repeats. Vera Dika in “ Games of Terror “ defines the stalker film as being responsible for creating a “ compulsive need for repetition “ by the viewers. There is a catchiness in John Carpenter's music, which allows the viewer the ability to remember certain themes, like the legendary Halloween music, adding even further to the strong effect his films and their music have. This catchiness is a product of both the simple repeating melodies and the minimalist sounds that forever link character to music. All subsequent Halloween films contain this catchy original theme, allowing the viewer to remember the original film and supports the story in the sequels. We associate Michael’s mask with his theme music and heavy breathing, like the string arrangement in Hitchcock’s “ Psycho “. Carpenter’s music literalizes the sound of what we now associate as horror film sound.


Suspiria director Dario Argento differs from Carpenter and Kubrick in that he not only directed and composed this film but he became a member of a band to play score his soundtrack. This band originally named Cherry Five had a fairly banal prog-rock sound and often mimicked other more popular bands such as King Crimson and Soft Machine. Their early 1974 album contained the track “ Swan is murder 2 “ which hints at the eerie atmospheric sounds which would later be heard in the Suspiria soundtrack. Argento needed to a score that would match his fantastical visuals and horrifying supernatural murder scenes. He effectively created this score by joining Cherry Five as the composer and the band became “ Goblin “. This score by Goblin sounded both supremely menacing and extremely sinister. With its mixture of sighs, moans, gothic keyboard effects and throbbing strings the soundtrack completely disorients the viewer. The “ sound is in perfect synch with the visuals, but renders unstable the boundary between conventional, non-digetic “ mood “ music and digetic sound from within the film proper, as we are haunted by sounds “ from nowhere “ (From “ The Mother of all Horror Movies” by Linda Shulte-Sasse) This sound of “ nowhere “ is generated by non-traditional modern machines, like the machines and cutting techniques utilized by Penderecki. Goblin also played fairly traditional instruments such as bass guitar and drums, but it is the ravenous sound of the futuristic machine that fills the viewer with dread.



Given the progression of the home-built machines of penderecki, sala and others the horror sound follows in complexity as these machines and technology become more finite. The gigantic size of the Mixur-Trautonium becomes a mixing board and
now a Wii controller adapted to act as a Theremin. The Vocoder morphs into an application for a laptop. The sound however remains, inexplicable, still able to produce a reaction of dread. This new manifestation of horror sound is being created for it’s own sake; no longer is it necessary to accompany a film. Listeners are seeking out a soundtrack that matches the entropic lives they lead. The sound of horror leaves its departure point of a soundtrack and moves towards a destination
of something else, something that is beyond just “ music “. Listeners can now
easily identify the typification of horror, it has been personified by machines and postmodern artists wield this technology as a medium. To get to the internal architecture the “ unheimlich” postmodern artists are divesting themselves of the
linear narrative found in cinema and creating new genres within art. I will track this progression through recorded sound towards a more sculptural form.





“ We are only agents for the unseen forces that carry the charge of the spirits of
the air, the: “ unknown itself ” that is compulsive in its attempt to convey a secret message.” (From “The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music “ by Theodore Reik) This compulsive message from a haunted source aptly describes the compositions rendered by electronic musician The Caretaker aka James Kirby. Taking his alias and sonic generative feeling directly from “ The Shining “. Referencing as his starting point the reverb-heavy tones of the Gold Room, where jack meets his past and Lloyd delivers his message. The Caretaker as a musician has been through many incarnations as an artist, but it is his epic 6CD collection titled “Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia” and ominous “Persistent Repetition Of Phrases “ that marks a turning point towards pure auto-acoustic noise. The Persistent Repetition Album still contains an orchestrated piano composition (this track titled after the album) it is a sample that constantly repeats the same 9 chords. This piano becomes only background noise to a tour through a decaying archive of scratched record jumps, muffled dust and cicada like clicks. It stops a moment in time, rendering it almost two-dimensional. We hear the moment, can imagine a dirty record playing in a large gothic space, yet we do not need to actually look at a physical object to feel all this. The inherent quality of horror lies within the machines that the musician utilizes. A past that is generated by the thing that eliminated and effectively “killed” it. The release “ Theoretically Pure Amnesia “ is as the artist claims: “ offers signposts through a labyrinth of faulty remembrances, pointing their way towards the peculiarities dictating the manner by which the mind stores and attempts to recover information” The title track 'Lacunar Amnesia' references a condition that leaves a specific event or a Lacuna (a gap) in the record of memory. These pieces hold the listener in a holding pattern that doesn’t seem to be in the same place every time. The similarities to characters from The Shining are relevant as “ Jack “ and “Lloyd “ are both memories and nothing is ever really there. The Caretaker deposits the listener within the memory gap. His tracks loop ancient music hall romance, which is interjected with crackle. Crackle is the material signature of obsolete technology, that of the record. “Crackle disrupts presence in multiple ways: first by reminding us of the material processes of recording and playback, second by connoting a broken sense of time, and third by veiling the official ‘signal’ of the record in noise. (from “ The Metaphysics of Crackle “ by K Punk guest DJ of Pontone ) This movement of eliminating and fracturing an original form to get to it’s source, is theoretically the end point of post modern art.



Demdike Stare a duo from outside Manchester, UK began recording music in an effort to create a soundtrack for a non-existent horror film. They have been hailed
as giving electronic music a “ gothic edge “ and “ occult status “. It isn’t their sonic compositions however, that set them within the category of visual artists, it is the performative aspects of their work. Over the years Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty / Demdike Stare have begun to create site-specific works. Incorporating both sound and visuals that are improvised for an audience. Sean Canty pulls film clips from a myriad of sources including 16 mm splatterhouse reels, foreign pornographic filmsand early 1960’s Giallo dramas. These clips are stored in raw format on his laptop computer and are then live edited to the music created simultaneously by Miles Whittaker. Demdike Stare performs globally in architecturally unique locations such as churches or natural locations like a forest. They utilize the space as a thematic background to whatever piece they will create in it. Their compositions utilize physical space as a matrix to create a striking visual performance. Again Demdike attempts to define the concept of the “ in-between “.

Demdike Stare explains their work takes cues from Futurism, Atmospheric Art and Drama, then attempts to move beyond these know forms towards something else unknown. They feel the typical audience member is frightened when unable to identify a specific musical genre. This audible mash-up can be heard clearly on the album “ Liberation Through Hearing “ which takes cues from arabesque themes, early Techno music and the Tibetan Book of The Dead. Their sound bridges the gap between the arcane and hyper modern; with a mix of old vinyl records being run through high tech hardware. The video created for “ Forest Of Evil (Dawn) “ feels horrifying, yet for the most part is created with fairly banal imagery of caterpillars, a man on a swing and a few interjections of couples making love. The accompanying sonic track is composed of drum samples, what sounds like a digital alarm, chimes and repetitive blips yet it is frightening. Near the end of this piece there is a long break in which the sound becomes atmospheric, one can understand why often their music is mis-categorized as Hauntology, a title they refute. “ Original sources and dense analogue experiments weave around each other with little care for convention or stylistic expectation, instead throwing the pair's extensive musical knowledge into a set of tracks that, quite brilliantly, defy categorization” (Boomcat) The Duo known also as “Lancashire's sons of occult darkness” are on a trajectory towards the future.The recordings they leave behind are almost as ephemeral as their performances.



The video installation “Suspiria, 2002/2003” by Stan Douglas was created for Documenta 11 and made its debut in Kassel, Germany. The installation was titled after Argento’s 1977 epic film and the accompanying soundtrack contained much
of the original music by “ Goblin “. The installation was a pastiche of surveillance video with scenes from Grimm’s fairy tales, “ acted out by a contemporary-looking cast in the grotesque, translucent palette of a color television with bad reception”
(ArtForum 6,2003 by Nell McClister) The installation / project was a dim view
of the present, that sought to “ unveil the false promises of both history and technology, which involves the laying bare of the structures that inform and create it.” Interestingly the soundtrack which accompanied this dystopian fairytale was
created by two musician / producers who revel in machine mixes and who emphasize technology in their experimental discographies. John Medeski & Scott Harding collaborated on the Suspiria 2002/03 soundtrack to create a soundtrack
that would remix itself over the same 100 days as the visual project. The duo
utilized the original Goblin soundtrack as a starting point, then incorporated
fuzzy clicks, a distorted dulcimer, electro-static pulses and a bleak atmosphere.
This sound scape was later released as an LP, and can be located as digital rips
on the internet. The end result is an entropic sound for a seemingly endless video
presentation. The duo digitized the musical tracks and wrote a code to regenerate
the sounds, hence the music never quite repeats itself and it's generate as the computer combines it in different ways for about 100 days. The soundtrack echoes the visual intersections by using variations of musical themes recorded on a bank
of synchronous tracks which may be played back in groupings remixed in real time by the same computer system used to switch the video. Interestingly the computer
creates the final work, the artists have given their raw conceptual ideas to the machine. The structure of technology that Douglas spoke of is laid bare as it’s spectral form and voice haunt the walls of Kassel. Technology replacing the worker,
which has always been the fear of humanity in the mechanical age.


Sound as sculpture is the end goal of Oakland artists Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh, better known as “ Archive “. Working within a field they deem to be a
place of both spatial and temporal experimentation. A brief look at “ Archive’s catalogue from 2001 to 2005, their project Art After Death centered on the
overlaps of metaphysics and Art History. From 2004-2007, they produced works from a massive commercial sound effects library, exploring the rhetorical and sculptural dimensions of these complex cultural archives. Presently the artists compose, teach and work as “ sonic consultants “. I would like to focus specifically on three of Archive’s interactive installations, which utilize specifically horror effects. The first piece exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts and The University of Texas is entitled “Flesh ++ Blood I and II “. They are two versions of a generative text and sound sculpture. In both cases, the sounds of flesh and blood spurting, gushing, ripping, flaying, etc. are output to transducers which are attached to large pieces of glass, as the titles of these (presumably faked) sound effects are output to a nearby monitor. Chris Kubick arrived at creating art from sound effects, after a brief career designing sounds for movies. These samples mentioned above of
blood spurting etc. were utilized for the piece Flesh ++ Blood I and II in an effort
to transport the listener / viewer to a place of gore. There is no actual gore present but the crisp, clean sheets of plexiglass that line the walls, practically beg to be dripping with it. This piece deals with the meanings associated with "sound effects", “ those sounds that are seemingly not "sound" enough to simply be called sounds”. (from the website of Chris Kubick). Archive also as a project, “ traced the history of a stock scream sound effect now known as the “Wilhelm Scream” (the original title in the Warner sound effects archives was “Man Being Eaten by Alligator”). This scream effect has been used in over 75 movies, including all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, as well as a number of TV shows and even video games. The “ Scream “ piece was part of a larger project (The Sound Library) in which they paired movie sound effects with their titles from the stock sound effect catalogues. Kubick and Walsh built collections of comparable sounds such as various recordings of ringing bells or galloping horses and created a program that projected the name of each sound effect as it was being played, showing the huge variety of linguistic associations and emotional responses that can be made with very similar sounds. The “ Sound Library “ was printed out and included in an article written by Anne Walsh for Cabinet magazine. Walsh writes, “There are stories embedded within sound effects, but we can’t really know what they are, even if the empirical evidence—the sounds themselves—is very specific. A sound is a sound is a sound, and “Human, Horror // Body Squishing and Crushing” may be what it says
it is, but it’s more likely someone pulverizing a watermelon or the body of a dead chicken.” Or , in the case of the modern horror sound effect it may be a machine’s interpretation of a sonic story. The sound library installation and performance was given at The University of Texas, within their main auditorium. “ A Thousand Years Of Sound “ was presented as a juxtaposition of sound and image. A montage of the sound effect titles were projected on opposing walls, whilst the effects themselves
were played over various speakers in the room. The listener could read the title
and visualize the sound, creating a personal internal artwork. This piece attempted to defy genre-classification and it was as much an art piece as an experiment.


Listening, viewing and analyzing these Artists works one can see a similarity
of internal evolution that is rendered audible. A growth from accompaniment that sought to disturb, then shifting to a unique classification. The “ Horror Sound “
began as a progressive exploration of what displaces the listener. This exploration necessitated a fracture from traditional composition and instrumentation. A focus on non-digesis became a craft and the need for new sources required the manufacture of new technology. Fear is generated by an instinct of the unknown and of the uncanny, modern technology encapsulates the dichotomy of technic and geist. Modern artists designed machines to create dissonance within the individual who would experience their output. Directors embraced what could be created cinematically and later what they would add as a sonic “ dialogue” to the narrative. These hybrid director / composers paved the way for sonic horror as art for itself. Now postmodern artists seek to move beyond the process of genre, stripping away the formal outline of cinema first and sound as accompaniment. They look beneath for the architecture, the actual voice of fear. “ Archive “ desires to expose the associations between words that denote sound and sound as sound. Their spare sculptures an attempt to remove landscape from sound, forcing the viewer to manifest his/her own auditory hallucinations. The Caretaker disrupts time traveling between the archaic and modern similtaneously. His atmospheric noise contains a technologically generated memory of a past that never was. He forces the listener to feel haunted, his machines outputting tones that seem so familiar that it is uncanny. The discography of Demdike Stare contains many tracks that are knit together by thousands of looping samples. Like a Gordian knot the viewer finds themselves utterly lost and unable to place the performances into a known “ type “. Computers meld visuals and audio for the duo a similarity that is shared with the other artists I have presented. The historically multilayered composition of Stan Douglas’s “ Suspiria 2002/2003 “ recalls Marx, politics and a fright of obsolescence. This phobia of replacement echoes throughout the final production of the piece, all 100 days of it.
Douglas, Medeski and Harding don’t even “make” the final work, the machine does. The malefactor has been mis-identified as the result, but it is instead the attempting to name the thing. Ready to categorize our fears into, scary music or gory visuals
we overlook the mechanism that generates these fears. If we close our eyes to automation, we still hear its progress. The movie is now cut and assembled as music-video accompaniment.