These visceral reactions make genuine fear arise, especially when humans empathize with the likeable characters on screen, like Regan (Nummenmaa, 2021, p. ![]() ![]() When people identify as the protagonist in their viewing experience, they also face the monster head-on. ![]() This connection to the foreshadowing silence makes people associate this uncanny quiet with real life. Despite the audience’s awareness that they are safe at home, “humans are predisposed to think that whatever we see or hear is real” (Nummenmaa, 2021, p. Furthermore, people often identify with the characters on screen, making it seem as if the viewer is undergoing the same experience. This translates to the real world as people are unnerved by silence. The sounds of nature and infrequent dialogue make it more impactful when the audience does hear a noise. Yet, the film is rarely silent, as it has natural sounds that occur in nature, in the diegetic world. However, one of the Abbotts' kids, Regan, who is deaf, discovers the creature’s weakness with her broken hearing aid, which permeates the monsters hearing and debilitates it (Krasinski, 2018). The family must go through a variety of challenges, including losing a child to a feral hyper-sensitive monster. This movie follows a family, The Abbotts, who are trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world where sound is hazardous. In horror films like A Quiet Place (2018), the director, John Krasinski, uses a mixture of silence and sound to create fear. It is the “pecific acoustic features such as roughness constantly perceived as threatening automatically activate the brain’s fear circuit” (Nummenmaa, 2021, p. Humans know that specific sound cues can cause an uneasy feeling, but it is also the silence before the jump-scare, which makes the amplification of the vociferous noise much more intense. Think of your favourite thriller and the hushed tones that gather before a strident scream. Horror movies rely on the sense of sound, but that is not to say they do not depend on the quiet as well. Even foregone silent films had an orchestra accompanying them (Bordwell, 2017, p. The diegesis of horror is dependent on timing cues, silence, and intensity of volume.įilms are never really silent, except with intentional pauses. The effectiveness of horror is due to the neurobiological fears we associate with sound and our ancestor’s survival response. Fear is embedded within human DNA as it “has a strong and distinct evolutionary function as a response to acute threats to physical and psychological well-being” (Nummenmaa, 2021, p. ![]() Furthermore, humans are always looking out for danger surrounding them because “our ancestors led dangerous lives” (Clasen, 2017, p. He further explains that humans are truly afraid of death and seeing unconventional monsters, which just so happen to occur in a panoply of horror movies. Mathias Clasen, a scholar of horror fiction and recreational fear, claims in his book, Why Horror Seduces (2017), that people are fearful in their nature (p. Modern horror uses sound design technology to manipulate the subconscious mind and make the audience descend into their darkest anxieties (Nummenmaa, 2021, p. The filmmakers of horror use key elements from the studies of psychology, technology, and musicology to make their films terrifying. American and European films rely on the effects of crisp sound, whether that sound is diegetic, non-diegetic, or a brief pause of silence before a juxtaposing, raucous scream (Bordwell, 2017, pp.
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