HEREDITARY: An Insidious Soundscape Of Tension And Terror

Hereditary is right around the corner. Get your tickets here!

Sunlight shines through the white curtains and birds are sweetly chirping among the windchimes dangling from the back porch. It’s around 10:00 on a beautiful morning in Maine. Sprawled out on the cotton sheets, Jessie slowly opens her eyes as she awakens to the sound of a dog licking her husband’s blood off the floor, and she realizes she is still handcuffed to the bed. Her throat is strained and sore from ineffective screams, since she is alone in the isolated lake cabin she and her husband, Gerald, retreated to days prior. This is the setting of Gerald’s Game, director Mike Flanagan’s film adapted from Stephen King’s 1992 novel. Desperate in her solitude, Jessie must resourcefully survive or accept her fate as she slips in and out of consciousness listening to the sounds outside. Flanagan wisely avoids a standard sound structure of jump scares and ominous score seen all too frequently within the horror genre, instead focusing on a natural or diegetic design to enhance the realism of his characters’ deeply uncomfortable situations. The environmental sounds of the outside world are, therefore, almost as painful as the metal chains around Jessie’s bruised wrists.

The manipulative method of utilizing silence and natural sound design in film is a technique that elevates tension and terror. Noises heard in everyday life and recreated on camera through Foley artists can evoke more dread on a primitive level and conjure relatable realism allowing audiences to put themselves into the shoes of the characters, making horrific moments on-screen linger and haunt viewers long after they leave the theater. Director Ari Aster employs this method in his upcoming horror film, Hereditary, to reinforce tension and terror, ultimately culminating in an astute assault on the senses.

Lehne and Koelsch’s scientific article, "Toward a General Psychological Model of Tension and Suspense", theorizes six key components underlying these barely tolerable experiences: conflict, dissonance, and instability; uncertainty; expectation, prediction, and anticipation; emotional significance of anticipated events; lack of control; and, temporal aspects. In order to convey tension on-screen and initiate an authentic audience disturbance, silence and stressed dialogue techniques are used to evade a potential or known threat. For example, the opening scene in Inglourious Basterds consists of a conversation between a French farmer hiding Jewish neighbors under his floorboards while he is simultaneously interrogated by the movie’s antagonist and S.S. Colonel, Hans Landa, played impeccably by Christoph Waltz. Through strong character design, dialogue, and lack of film score during their conversation, director Quentin Tarantino captures multiple components to drive tension while also holding the audience hostage on what the outcome will look like for those hiding.

The Silence of the Lambs takes a different approach by arousing tension from the antagonist’s point of view when Buffalo Bill wears night vision goggles to calmly watch FBI agent Clarice Starling struggle through the dark. Lacking an ominous score during the first minutes of the scene, heavy breathing and stumbling across various objects capture the natural sound, setting up her subsequent vulnerability and uncertain yet seemingly plausible demise that keeps viewers on edge. In Hereditary, silence loudly claims its seat at the Graham family dinner table while they struggle with grief. Aster builds tension in an otherwise loving setting and situation that can be all too relatable for viewers. Ultimately, when there is a portion of sound stripped away from a scene, there is a void that audiences are forced to fill themselves in order to properly interpret what they are watching. Filling in this blank space causes the viewer to become more intimately attached, therefore creating an emotional investment, connection, and vulnerability, allowing them to empathize with characters for a deeper viewing experience. 

As if visual techniques around special effects and gore aren’t enough to disturb audiences, filmmakers have taken silence to the extreme in order to produce a sense of terror so strong that it makes moviegoers physically ill. Infrasound consists of vibrations with frequencies below the lower limit of human audibility (under 20 Hz). Despite being unable to consciously hear infrasound, the human body detects the vibrations and reacts physically with feelings of nausea, headaches, dread, and even depression. While Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and David Lynch’s Eraserhead favor ambient sounds, French director Gaspar Noé’s psychological horror drama, Irréversible, takes it up a notch. The film is extremely violent to begin with; however, infrasound is played for sixty minutes, which causes such intense nausea and anxiety, people consistently walked out of the theater unable to finish the film at all. Additionally, the film Paranormal Activity is rumored to have used infrasound as well. So, while there may appear to be silence in a scene, it’s possible the low hum of infrasound is present and wreaking havoc.

While there are breathtaking and iconic film scores that have spanned decades, terror is produced also through organic sounds emitted from some of history’s most sadistic characters to enhance the fear from their mere presence. In Nightmare on Elm Street, the metal knives of Freddy Krueger’s glove as he slides them across equipment in his boiler room is almost too much to bear. The visceral roar of Leatherface’s chainsaw in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is ferocious enough to make anyone panic, and is still a common gag used in haunts during Halloween season. The simplest sound of machinery tied into a character’s signature weapon follows the viewer throughout the film and can all too often transition into real life. Even the presence of bystanders can evoke dread, as seen in the classic cult film The Wicker Man and Kevin Smith’s thriller, Red State. Both feature protagonists held captive who, despite being surrounded by people who could potentially help them, are certain of their unfortunate fate through collective preaching and singing. Hymns of worship and scripture from the Bible are demonized while members of a cult carry out barbaric acts for a seemingly greater good. Similar to the grotesque gurgling noise in The Grudge, Hereditary contains a simplistic bodily sound - a sound the youngest member of the Graham family makes, almost as a tick - that ends up haunting viewers throughout the film. These natural and humanistic sounds brilliantly produce dread without the use of a composer’s score, thus reiterating the concept that sometimes less is ultimately more. 

Audible information travels faster than the information humans receive from sight, which suggests that we have evolved to use sound as a first defense against predators. As seen in John Krasinski’s film, A Quiet Place, filmmakers are tapping into sound design in order to enhance primal fears while placing new emphasis on sound techniques for character survival, fear, and enhanced audience immersion. Additionally, cutting noise all together has been an effective technique to identify with deaf characters as seen in Hush and A Quiet Place. Ari Aster’s Hereditary is no different in this new style approach, and his unique use (and absence) of sound elevates an already terrifying family tale, forcing audiences to immerse themselves into his characters. Composer Colin Stetson also drew inspiration from nature and silence for Hereditary’s menacing score, which further supports the notion that subtle, natural sounds and silence are sometimes the best methods to scar viewers and arouse cringeworthy tension and terror on screen.