The first spooky sounds came inside the theater. Orson Welles rehearsing The War of the Worlds Photo: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images There are certain chords that still work.” Finding the bump that goes bump in the night “There’s something quite arcane, something primal and effective about them,” Hand says of horror audio tropes. To this day, those mid-century synthesized and impressionistic soundscapes remain crucial foundations for modern horror movies, further accentuating their timeless appeal and universal effects. With hushed tones and artificial clatters, backed by organ and orchestral crescendos and crackling narration, radio broadcasts quickly established a vocabulary of spooky sounds and tropes (from creaky doors to high-pitched shrieks) that would come to define horror and inspire listeners’ imaginations.īy the 1950s and ‘60s, as visual mediums became the primary storytelling devices for audiences, scary television series and movies utilized inventive technologies and abstract instrumentation to complement the screen, further evolving the sonic hallmarks of the genre. Over the ensuing decades, those corporeal, visceral noises - the foundation of gothic stories - migrated from the page to theatrical and radio productions, where sound designers amplified their text-based terror. “Reading novels from the 19th century, there might be clanking suits of armor and cobwebs, but were invested a lot in describing the sound of a distant wolf, or the scream of someone, or the heartbeat in the ears, or the whisper - those kinds of things are really central.” You hear that,” says Richard Hand, author of Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America and professor of media practice at the University of East Anglia. “The churning teeth and tongue - that’s really creepy. “I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck,” he writes. As Stoker illustrates a feasting vampire’s scarlet lips and bloody mouth, he engages the other senses. Look to Poe’s 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher, in which he describes an entombed woman’s reanimation within a cavernous castle by citing the “distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation” and “the grating of the iron hinges of her prison.” More than 50 years later, Bram Stoker found inspiration in Poe’s auditory descriptors, embedding them into his 1897 novel Dracula. Sounds permeated his gothic storytelling - filled with black cats screaming and hearts beating - and preyed upon readers with their detailed and chilling force. Throughout the last decade of his life, his poetry and prose bristled with words and phrasing so colorful they could practically be heard. Long before radio became mainstream entertainment, Edgar Allen Poe was already writing for the airwaves.
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