Long before radio became mainstream entertainment, Edgar Allen Poe was already writing for the airwaves. Throughout the last decade of his life, his poetry and prose bristled with words and phrasing ...

What does decapitation sound like? How about a demon birth? Foley artists explain just how difficult it is to engineer the sounds of horror. Photo: Gabor Kotschy / A24 People often ask Foley artist ...

I was recently watching a scene from the 2025 film Weapons for a monograph I’m writing and noticed a familiar sound: a low, unsettling drone as a character walks down a hallway. It’s the same kind of ...

The world is full of sounds, and sound can affect us greatly. Some sounds are pleasant, like the laughter of a small child or a babbling brook in a peaceful forest. Other sounds are unpleasant, like ...

The iconic shower scene in Psycho was originally supposed to play out without music. Instead composer Bernard Herrmann created “The Murder”: as the killing transpires, violins shriek and scream along ...

With Halloween around the corner, we asked Peter Brown, sound editor behind the movie Paranormal Activity to share his secret behind scary sound effects. Now it's time for our regular segment Words ...

In the opening scene of Silent Hill, it’s the first time players finally get to hear the notorious siren. This is probably the sound effect that defined the rest of the Silent Hill franchise and is ...

Why do so many horror film scores today sound similar to The Exorcist from 1973? Why do so many horror film scores today sound similar to The Exorcist from 1973? A lot of that is thanks to Krzysztof ...

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