The trio of films are narratively unconnected however, as the name suggests, the three films are linked by the common theme of violent revenge.
#Soundop audio editor referral series#
Park is best known for directing a series of three films known as The Vengeance Trilogy. Park Chan-wook is one of the leading voices of the Korean New Wave of Cinema, a movement that began in 1997 and gave rise to a variety of daring and creative masterpieces. Beyond that, it just sounds really, really cool. But it hits so well because the one sound says so much: its repetition makes you think of horror/insanity, the fact that it’s a foghorn makes you think of the ocean, and the singularity of it connotes isolation. It’s such an otherworldly, bassy sound-you can’t really tell if it’s something you might actually hear coming from a lighthouse in the 1890’s, or if it’s a completely made up science-fiction noise. But one of the best parts of the whole film (next to Pattinson and Dafoe’s performances) is the constant blaring foghorn that sounds off every five minutes throughout the duration of the film. The Lighthouse does some really interesting things with sound (a reoccurring mermaid shrieks at the camera in such an unearthly, washed out way the squawking of seagulls started to drive me up the wall). It pulls you to the edge of your seat because it wants to drag you further into the film. The Witch isn’t interested in wasting tension. A lot of modern horror movies are incredibly lazy in the way they use loudness when they want to make you jump in your seat, they let everything get really quiet and then they slap you across the face with a blaring sound cue. And the music isn’t afraid to build up to uncomfortable loudness for the sake of atmosphere. It sounds like someone is literally whispering in your ear. Later in the film, we meet a very evil certain somebody who only speaks in whispers-whose dialogue sounds so physical that you can hear their tongue hitting their teeth as they pronounce the letter ‘t’. It’s the soundtrack of anxiety, the musical equivalent of passing a 14-wheeler on a two lane highway. What gets you is the music: a playfully hostile drumbeat paired with what sounds like a hacksaw carving through a block of wood. But the image is so dark (the film’s nighttime scenes were shot mostly using candlelight and moonlight) that you can barely make out anything beyond a suggestion of the events.
She’s bent over a table, working at something, and even though we can’t see what she’s doing, WE KNOW what she’s doing (horror warning: it involves a baby and hammer). When the eponymous witch first appears on screen, we only see her back. The film is beautiful, but most of the emotion in the film is heard rather than seen. There’s a few things that work so, so well: the jarring way in which the music shifts from whispering to screaming, the constant repetition of certain eerie sounds, and the combination of specific audio and imagery to create such uncomfortable atmospheres.
All thanks goes to composer Mark Korven (both films) and sound designer Damian Volpe ( The Lighthouse) for building so much suspense through a few key sound effects and two really crafty scores. I want to talk about one really stand-out aspect present in both films (and I know I’m not the first to point this out): the score and sound design in The Witch and The Lighthouse are incredible. They’re both so disturbing, so absorbing, so big, so boring (in a good way), so weirdly secretive, so silly for how serious they are. So then I obviously went and rented Egger’s most recent film The Lighthouse, and honestly I’m not sure which one is better. I watched Robert Egger’s film The Witch ( The VVitch) a few weeks ago (I’ve been kicking myself since 2015 to rent it off Amazon, but then it popped up on Netflix) and dear lord what an amazing film. Minor spoilers for The Witch and The Lighthouse
0 kommentar(er)
