Cosmic Horror is a subgenre of horror that emphasises the fear of the unknown to create mysterious stories. Pioneered by novelist H.P. Lovecraft, famous for works such as The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness, the genre can be characterised by 3 main elements:
Annihilation Firstly I watched the film Annihilation directed by Alex Garland. The premise is about a group of explorers who enter a mysterious area known as "The Shimmer" where plant and animal life is constantly being mutated by an extra-terrestrial force, initialising from a meteor landing. The clip above shows the characters entering “The Shimmer” for the first time. Warped and glitchy sounds can be heard coming from the forcefield structure suggesting an otherworldly quality. As I watched on in the film, there were some moments of Cosmic Horror where the characters would come across mutated plant and animal life, however from a sound perspective I was disappointed. The sounds of these mutations were very much grounded in reality and while it worked well for this film, did not show the creative strangeness I was looking for. The above scene shows a moment where an alien entity takes over the body of one of the characters. The visuals of the scene are very striking and the emotion of the scene is portrayed through the use of music which works well. The sound effects for the scene however take a back seat to the music and are almost silenced during the most chaotic moment of the sequence. This works as the score blurs the line between music and sound design with the instruments taking on a variety of strange and glitchy textures. As I wanted to hear how they tackled the sound effects in this scene, this film was not as useful as I had hoped. The musical approach could work for my project, however I don’t feel as though it captures Cosmic Horror in the way I had envisioned. Color Out of Space I decided to watch this film directed by Richard Stanley as it is a modern adaptation of the novel written by H.P. Lovecraft of the same name. It has a similar premise to Annihilation with a meteor falling to earth and causing strange happenings and aberrations. The difference with this one however is, instead of inducing mutations, this phenomenon causes the characters to gradually lose their minds as strange occurrences that can't be comprehended frequently happen. Throughout the film, pink light represents the extent of what the characters can comprehend of the situation. The sounds that this entity makes are very otherworldly and can't really be pinned down as sounding like anything in particular. This works really well for this movie as it reinforces to the audience that this entity is far out of our scope of understanding as humans. I would like to use this approach to tackling the sounds of the enemy in my game by utilising unlikely sound sources to create an otherworldly experience. (An interesting, non-audio related feature of this film: The colour pink, or magenta, was used to represent the entity because no wavelength of light exists for the colour. We only see it as our brains stitch the frequencies together creating magenta somewhere between violet and red. This is a great way to convey a "new" colour that has never been seen before!) During one sequence in the film, one of the characters has a vision of what is assumed to be the alien planet that the meteor has come from. The world looks like a planet sizes organism that has millions of tentacle-like arms along its surface. These are accompanied by fittingly squishy sounds along with other unnatural audio drones as the camera sweeps through the landscape. Tentacles and other organic appendages are frequently featured in Lovecraft's works, most notable in his best know story "The Call of Cthulhu" which features a building sized squid-like monster. While my game will not include such visuals due to my limitations in the art department, I will attempt to convey Lovecraft's signature monster features, through sound. Why are there so few Cosmic Horror Films?
After watching these two films I began to understand why this genre is not very common. Due to the intrinsic nature of the genre itself, conveying something that cannot be comprehended in a visual format is always going to be a challenge. I do however think it could work far better by cleverly utilising and focusing on audio. The mind can easily be tricked by audio and this technique is used by any sound designer on a budget. E.g. cooking bacon can sounds like a crackling fire or snapping celery can sound like a broken leg. By this logic, an offscreen (or invisible in my case) monster can be made to sound unfathomable with the use of interesting layers of incomprehensible sounds to suggest a powerful otherworldly being.
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Matt BurrowsDocumenting my final year at university studying sound design. Archives
April 2021
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