Fear and Sound in the Movies

Movie Poster of the 1925 film, The Phantom of the Opera

When I was a kid, I watched The Sixth Sense at a birthday party. And it was pretty scary but not in the way you would think. I had basically never seen a horror movie before that, since my younger brother dictated what we could and could not watch, so I spent most of the film braced to be completely terrified by what happened on screen.

The scariest part of the experience was the sound of the score and way the other people screamed. The way it broke the silence made me flinch every time, and I think that is the key to horror movies.

I saw The Phantom of the Opera during summer break, with a live Organ composure. This got me thinking, in the silent era most films did not come with a standardized score. The music was played along to the film was usually a unique composition by whatever in-house musician or band the theater had. This makes "horror" more difficult to produce, though many horror films came out during this time (Nosferatu, Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and many more.) These films rely more on quick cuts and ghastly visuals which evoke a similar feel but accompanying scores of modern sound horror is what really gets you heart pumping. The composition of Phantom that I saw was only one instrument, the organ, and I thought it did a decent job, but it still wasn't exactly a "scary" movie due to it's lack of soundscape. Though it also could be to Phantom being less of a "scary" film and being more of a "dark romance" but not in the modern way, in the old way.

Sound does function as an integral part of modern cinema, it makes a deeper sense of immersion, and maybe thats why horror is better with it. I'd personally say it's eye of the beholder, ear of the viewer, so it really depends.