What is it about?

This article explores the use of noise in the scoring and sound design of recent horror soundtracks. Using case studies on Darling (Keating 2015), Crimson Peak (del Toro 2015) and the found-footage genre, the article argues that the noise is deliberately employed as a signifier of the abject. Drawing on Metz’s ideas of music, sound and speech as three distinct channels of communication, noise’s ability to move fluidly between these channels and to collapse them into a single sonic channel is identified as a key way in which noise transgresses boundaries and operates as both a symbolic and a concrete manifestation of horror.

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Why is it important?

There has been an increasing interest in sound design in film music studies in the last decade; and similarly an increasing interest in ideas of noise in communication studies in the same period. This article brings these two disciplines together in exploring the idea of noise in relation to the music and sound design of several recent horror films, and the way that noise itself operates as a signifier of the abject in these films.

Perspectives

This article grew out of a series of papers I presented at the Fear 2000 conferences at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK between 2016-2018, starting the the material on found footage. This conference is dedicated to exploring horror TV and cinema since 2000, and so is focused on new developments in the genre. Although I am a musicologist, this is primarily a film/ media studies conference, so I have been interested not just at exploring the innovations in horror's sound and music, but in finding accessible ways of talking about these things to a non-musicological audience.

Janet Halfyard
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

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This page is a summary of: Sounding the abject in contemporary horror scoring, Horror Studies, April 2022, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/host_00049_1.
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