That Sounds Scary

Reasons behind valuing different aspects of film can also be understood by diving into the country’s film cultures- and for my case, horror film cultures. What scares a country most certainly affects film elements both broad and specific, from overall themes of film to individual sounds.

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In a comparison between another J-horror and remake of Ringu and The Ring, scholar Valarie Wee states that “the mainstream Hollywood aesthetic is largely committed to the literal, the realistic, and the representative”, which in turn altered the remake from the Japanese original in a variety of ways. 24 More generally, Midnight Eye writer Nicholas Rucka, finds Western horror as stories that are a

 

“cautionary tale wherein the main characters are warned against doing something, yet they ignore it, paying the highest cost for it: death”. 22

 

At the very least, the characters learn from mankind’s mistakes from their horrific trials. On the other hand, Wee continues in her Japanese-to-American horror remake analysis that

 

“traditional Japanese culture does not revolve around good and evil”, (aka the American basis) but that the horror lies in either disaster caused inescapably by nature, and/or around human relationships. 24

 

Furthermore, a popular theme of scary stories in Japan is religiously/spiritually grounded, and tells of earth’s “avenging ghosts” that seek “to destroy the person responsible for his or her untimely demise”, even if the revenge spreads uncontrollably. 25

 

Relating this back to Kairo and Pulse, we can find how these themes and genre stereotypes have influenced the films all the way through to sound design. The ghost walking scene addresses the literal enemies in American horror versus the more metaphysical and/or natural threats of Japanese horror well. The silence behind Kairo’s ghost adds an oddly realistic and more importantly, natural feel of the scene. The audience is simply watching a ghost walk towards them, there is no non-diegetic noise as distraction, nor are there sound effects that render the ghost “fake”. One may reason that adding sound effects to a ghost make them seem more convincing; especially as audiences are in a suspension of disbelief whilst sitting in a darkened, quiet theater. I argue that in American horror, sound effects accompanying ghosts are commonplace and overused. In turn, this saturation of ghostly sound effects in the horror genre confirm that the ghost is an abject “other”, a literal enemy in the realm of the film’s world, that can in no way enter the audiences’ existence or real world- because it visually looks inhuman and audibly sounds strange (or “ghostly”).

 

This technique can be heard in Pulse, as the ghost walks in front of a groaning and ethereal orchestrated soundtrack igniting fear and reconfirming the presence. To refer to Rucka’s general theme of Western horror as paying for wrongdoings; the low beating pulses near the end of this scene act as if it is the drum roll before an execution; Stone had made a mistake entering a “Forbidden Room”, investigating matters that should be left to rest. Consequently, he pays for his mistake by the film’s audibly real enemy but earth’s unreal character, the ghost.

 

Oppositely is Kairo, created in a horror film culture/genre where ghosts and spirits are generally believed to walk the earth. Kairo’s story simply stars a revengeful ghost, of which no sound effects need to convince a Japanese audience of that.

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