That Sounds Scary

It is important to add that what scares a country’s citizens is subjective to time as well. For example, looking back at the 1950’s, it doesn’t take much to relate Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the Red Scare dominating the media at the time. And Godzilla would probably never have been created if it wasn’t for the horrors of WWII. Even Kairo and Pulse are dated horrors, as it was produced during a period of rapid advancement in personal technology with unforeseeable future effects. Nevertheless, the historical influence of films can change sound design, even if only minutely.

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In Kairo, an example of this is in a later scene of Ryosuke messing around on the computer. When the internet boots up, (and later, when the “Forbidden Room” video suddenly appears) the dial-up sound begins. To me, this sound emotionally triggers more nostalgia than fear. But the long series of beeps and static is utilized further in Kairo like a motif, to signify when the computer is connecting to the internet and simultaneously, revealing the “Forbidden Room” video feed. This sound in itself is not necessarily frightening, it is not dissonant or a low frequency, but it is a ringing into a virtual world- for Kairo, a cursed virtual world. That would make me never want to hear dial-up tones ever again.

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Pulse has a certain sound cut from the film because of a horrific national event, the September 11th attacks. While this terrorism did not sway the entire theme, story, or other broad elements of the film, it did affect a bite of sound. It is from a scene I did not analyze individually; one towards the end of the film where the world falls apocalyptic, and features a plane crashing down. According to the DVD commentary, the plane crashing sound is omitted from the DVD version of Pulse (not Kairo and not the previous theatrical release of Pulse). 21 As mentioned in my section over sound techniques, sound can spur emotional and physical responses. Since many people were scarred from the 9/11 experience, it seems responsible to remove a sound that could be extremely sensitive and emotionally dangerous to American audiences at the time. Nevertheless, if this historical event did not occur, the sound element here would not have changed, perhaps giving a different feel to the apocalyptic scene as a whole.