#with focus on storytelling ambience and unique and artsy visuals

[canisalbus]

very random question and don’t feel obligated to reply but your style reminds me of dark souls/pathologic/those types of games in general. that might just be due to the historical context but i’m curious, are you a fan of games like that?

If I had to guess it could be just the vaguely historical setting, religious overtones and occasional darker themes? My knowledge on Dark Souls et al. is sparse at best, people have been telling me to give them a try but I haven't gotten around to it.

[fingaudioart]

Hill House, and Audio Horror vs Film Horror

I got to thinking about this when an audio producer on Twitter asked what people thought the scariest parts of Haunting of Hill House, other than the jump scares. What struck me while reading the responses were almost all things that depended on the visuals, and would be very hard to move into the realm of audio.

I feel like many/most people think of horror movies as a template to build off of for horror audio fiction...which is fair, because for many of us, horror audio fiction wasn’t a thing we could find to listen to until recently (myself included). And it’s not uncommon to hear a successful, talent audio producer say something along the lines of “An audio drama is like a movie, without needing a million dollar budget.”

I agree with the thought, generally: audio fiction does have many similarities to film, but if you stretch it too far, it can be a dangerous approach. And it can be especially dangerous for Horror.

Let’s think about how we could move the Bent Neck Lady into audio (spoilers ahead). Except for one scream, she is silent and unmoving. To move it into audio, we’d either need a narrator (or someone to tell us what’s happening), or to make Bent Neck Lady move around. The first option would keep the nature of the ghost intact, but we would be robbed of having it happen in front of us. The second option would change the nature of the ghost entirely. This is before we even talk about the twist, that hinges on Bent Neck Lady largely being a silhouette, which obscures information without feeling like anything.

Horror is a genre that is especially dependent on craftsmanship, regardless of the medium. It’s a genre where--and you’re going to murder me for saying this--you don’t need a good story to be scary. You need a scary situation/scene, told with skill, but even if the scenes/plot/characters around it are terrible, you can still make the audience feel afraid (Looking at you, Argento).

That’s not to say the story doesn’t matter. In fact, a large part of what makes Haunting of Hill House so good is that it’s part horror, but also part family melodrama (and it actually spends more time on the melodrama than the horror), blended together so the ghosts have meaning. Bent Neck Lady is disturbing the first time you see it, but it’s the story behind it that makes her stay with you long after you’ve finished the show.

But if we set aside the story, and focus on the scary moments...they are pure filmmaking. Every aspect is working to create fear: the sets and art direction, the creature design, the pacing, the blocking, the editing, the sound design.

The same way a horror movie uses every weapon of filmmaking, a horror audio drama should use every weapon of audio to create dread/fear/suspense. But the flip side is, just as Haunting of Hill House isn’t using the tools of horror literature, your audio drama shouldn’t try to be a movie.

But I think we also need to own up to something: many of us (most of us?) have more experience watching horror movies than listening to horror audio dramas. So let’s get analytical here. What are films strengths? Audio’s strengths? Weakness? And how do these work in service of horror? Any tips for the audio drama producer?

Filmmaking’s Unique Gifts

Before I get into the list, I want to be very clear: I’m not to saying you can’t do versions of this in an audio drama. In fact, when these are successfully used in audio, they can be outright amazing. But they take a lot more work, either by carefully setting up signature sounds*, or by having narration, or some other creative way no one has done yet. The point of this list is that film does these things easily.

There are some obvious things, like, ya know, visuals. I don't think there's any amount of words or sounds that would allow me to imagine Giger’s Xenomorph. Some things just need to be seen.

One of film's special talents is it gives the audience an understanding of a location without even trying. I don’t mean the layout of a house (that can be confusing), but present an audience with one shot of a bedroom, and they’ll instantly understand where the bed is, the window, the door, the closet, the bedside tables. Films communicate small spaces so easily, they don't even need to stop to do it…a character walks in the room doing whatever, and as long as the space is seen by the camera, the audience gets it.

In horror, this is vital when the fear you're trying to create is that of a physical threat. Where is the killer? Behind the bookcase? Walking towards you from across the lawn?

Related to this idea of a physical space, films also have the ability to makes things appear--and disappear--quickly and unexpectedly. This is moments like Mike Meyers appearing in the closet in Halloween, or later, when Dr. Loomis looks over the edge of the Balcony, and Michael Meyers has vanished.

Perhaps film’s most famous strength is the montage. You can easily cut between different scenes and settings, without the audience ever getting confused.

There is one tool of film that I am very frustrated won’t work in audio: the Title Card. I don’t mean the title of the show, I mean those cards that say things like “Burbank, CA” or “CIA Headquarters” or “3:23pm.” Text on screen is a painless way to give the audience information without tripping up the storytelling.

Finally, let’s talk about one of film’s most powerful tricks...patience.

A film can stretch moments out, sometimes with slomo, but often with editing between close-ups. You can also have moments where nothing happens, you just linger in the mood/ambience/characters reactions. 

A great example is the “Spielberg-Face”, those shots when the characters are reacting to something the audience hasn’t seen yet. In Jurassic Park, we spend a full 30 seconds watching jaws drop before we see the first dinosaur. This is pretty nuts, when you think about it. The true stars of the movie aren’t introduced with a speech, or a title card, or a curtain pulling back, but by the characters just staring in the distance for half a page.

Pausing the action, or even just stretching it out, is one of the fundamental tools of horror movies. It’s a way to create the mood: Show the spooky location, play the spooky ambience. It’s a way to create suspense in a scene, think of the long POV shot scanning the room for that noise. End the moment with something suddenly appearing, and you have the basic recipe for a jump scare. Even if you decide to be an artsy horror story, like Haunting of Hill House, silently drawing out the action is your primary weapon. Done well, the audience will be rapt, knowing that something could be about to happen any moment, even though as far as the plot goes, we haven’t moved much at all.

I’ll be honest, if I could go back in time and tell the younger version of me who hadn’t made an audio drama yet that you can’t draw out a moment the way you do in film, I probably would not have believed me. In my work as a TV Editor, it’s been one of the tricks that has really elevated my pieces...it feels like magic. But I’ll never forget editing my first audio piece, having a character fumble with a doorknob while trying to escape someone who was chasing them. They grunted at the door as the footsteps got closer and closer, and it was lousy. It felt like the manipulation it was.

Audio’s Unique Gifts

The thing that audio does better than any other media--and this is controversial--a narrator feels like they are talking directly to you, the listener (a narrator in a film feels more like they are talking to an auditorium). Now, here are people who find that narration is jarring and takes them out of the story. They aren’t wrong--you can’t argue someone’s experience--but that’s certainly not what happens to me. If you are one of these poor souls, I hope you take some time to listen to some narration and reprogram your brain, because you’re missing out on some magic.

The other great thing about sound is it activates the imagination. Films can also do this, of course, but audio does it be default.

Sound is also very good at evoking a sense of touch. Texture. Clothing. Almost anything you can feel in your hand.

While sounds is great at telling us about what’s very close, it also tells us about the world in the distance, i.e. ambiences. The sound of a forest transports us to a forest that exists in all directions. Distant traffic can tell us if the city is awake or asleep.

Audio also does an amazing plot twist that I’m gonna call the “Pull Back to Reveal” twist (yeah, that’s a film term). This is when, deep into a scene, something is revealed to the audience that the characters understood was there the whole time. While a movie can usually only sustain this for a minute or two, audio dramas can push this for a really long time. The Truth’s classic “The Dark End of the Mall” is a great example, as is the episode “Have You Seen My Mom?” It’s use in horror is more limited though...suspense works the best when the audience knows as much or more about the situation than characters (a.k.a. Audience Superior), and this is a twist that is Audience Inferior.

And, not for nothing: It’s way cheaper than a film. That’s not say the money doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t matter in the same way. 

Film’s Failings

The hardest part of film is the flip side of its strengths: it’s so easily grounded in reality, it’s very hard to step out of it. That’s more of a problem than you think.

Take the sentence, “Andy called his sister-in-law.” While it takes just four words to write in a book, in a movie, you are going to be contorting dialog or some other clever trick, to get the audience to understand “that’s his wife’s sister.” (Non-narrated audio dramas also have this problem with exposition.)

Same goes for backstory. In the middle of a scene, a book can say things like “She’d been working on this for ten hours now, and was ready to scream.” One sentence. A film would have to lay out exposition, or clues for the audience to put it together.

Film also has a hard time conveying senses other than sound or sight. During scenes where a character walks into a place and says “Ugh, what’s that smell!”, I never really imagine the smell, I just see an actor pretending to smell something.

Visuals can be too intense. Gore or nudity are the first things that come to mind in this category, and are often alluded to in a film for exactly that reason. But even if they are merely hinted at, the film audience may spend a scene wondering “Are they going to actually show it?”, which knocks you out the movie a little. 

Films are complicated to make, at every level. Casting is tougher---the actor needs to both sound and look the part. There’s the expense of sets and lighting, the effort of just getting a crew to a location can be monumental. And once it’s all shot, film editing is more complicated and time intensive than audio editing, and not just because it involves audio editing.

Audio's Weakness

The biggest: There's a big Blindspot right in front of the audience. Without some careful context, raw audio recording from real life is disorienting at best, intelligible at worst. Most sounds that come from the blank spot are descriptive, they generally tell us if someone’s shoes are wet, but they won’t tell who is walking around the room in wet shoes.

This blind spot can be especially dangerous to a producer, because in real life, our brain attaches sounds to the objects it sees, and when you understand what a sound is, it’s easy to place it. Because a producer knows what sound they are placing in the piece, it’s easy to think your sound design is intelligible. Sounds we don’t understand are also hard to place in the space. I personally find that while stereo and ambisonics can help make the sounds be more distinct from each other, they don’t really locate them precisely.

Another weakness of audio, characters are hard to tell apart. This can especially affect women's voices, who don't tend to have as much variation. This isn’t as true if the audience has seen the face of the actor talking, something about that seems to lock in our understanding of a voice (video though, not just a headshot). But without a face, it’s tough. EDIT: So I wasn’t very clear with that last point. To be clear, it’s not that you CAN’T cast people who sound different, or that you can’t direct people with similar voices to give different performances. It’s that you need to make a point of doing so. And while I have personally found that women’s voices are more likely to sound alike, that’s not the main idea. We remember face’s very easily, and names relatively easily (unless you’re me, I’m terrible at names). Voices without faces are easily confused.

This character confusion especially applies to large casts...I have a hard time imagining an audio only version of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, for example. Put twelve characters in a room for an audio drama, and it’s gets confusing for the listener really quickly.

If you aren't using a narrator, making time pass can be hard. A Rocky montage needs to be carefully setup.  "Cut To: Five Minutes Later" is damn near impossible without narration.

Sound Effects need to be more meticulous. THE AVENGERS can sweeten a superhero punch so it hardly sounds like a punch at all, and the visuals on screen will lock it into place. Without a picture to give a sound context, they need to be much more realistic for them to be understood correctly.

So let’s put this all together.

Lets turn it into an “approach,” and design some scenes that work easily in the medium. 

Ambiences are a strength, so we’ll pick a setting that has an interesting one, and avoid things like quiet rooms. We’ll have a small number of characters, let’s say four or less, and to make it easier for audience to remember who is who, we’ll cast actors with clearly different voices, and we can help on the script level by making sure they all have different motivations/goals/emotional states. To get that intimacy of the voice, we’ll have at least some of the characters close to each other (and the mics), and not shouting across the room.

The physical setup of the room will be straight forward, and our characters’ movements though the space will be clearly motivated and direct (“Does this key unlock this door?”), if a character has busy work that moves them through the space, the details won’t matter (like they are doing dishes). We’ll also want to have some moments that play on that sense of touch. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll want to paint some clear visuals for the listener to imagine.

For a horror scene, you really want to work your ambiences to make them add to the tension, vs just adding realism. We first want the monsters in the distance, say on the other side of a door or outside the house, or somewhere in the woods. Make our scared characters really close to the listener, play the sounds that you only hear when you are right next to them, like their breathing, swallows, adjusting the clothes or their make-shift weapon.

When the monster enters the room, have it spend as little time as possible in the blindspot, so avoid things like fist fights and fast-paced footchases. Instead get the monster right inside our character's personal bubble. If you’re aiming for a startle, instead of having it leap out in front of the hero like in a movie, you’d want to skip the blindspot, and have the monster pounce onto the hero--using those touch sounds that are so intense.

To me, that sounds like a scary scene.

It’s Not a Formula, and All of This is Nonsense

In fact, you probably wouldn’t want every scene in your piece to follow this, because a) it’ll get repetitive, and b) when you go against the medium, you’re more likely to make some magic (if you pull it off). But I do think it’s important to realize when the big moment of your piece is resting on some of the weaknesses. When this happens, you may want to make sure you’re leaning on something really strong to carry the weight. Other times, you may want to toss around some other ideas, make sure that it’s actually working, and to see if it could be improved.

Also, even though I’ve written a lot of words here, I fully expect someone has already proven every one of these rules wrong. But I also think it’s a good exercise to go through this and figure out why I’m wrong.

The medium matters. And I hate writing conclusions, so I’m ending it here.

*Signature Sound: A sound that the audience understands to mean something specific, such as a doorbell or a gunshot.