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| Talk,
Justin Harries,
13 January 1999 | |
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This week, amongst a plethora of hype, The Blair Witch Project finally arrives. Much has been made of the faux documentary aspect of the film – its chaotic griminess a breath of fresh air for horror fans raised on a diet of Freddie Kruger and Chucky.
Not only do we know we are watching a different breed of movie by the shaky, spew-inducing camera work but also by the fact that we aren’t bludgeoned by a soundtrack that ‘informs’ us what to feel at every twist and turn. If it wasn’t for the abysmal sound quality a lot of this film would have been effectively silent. Which is a surprise when you consider how successful the film was.
Mainstream film audiences seem suspicious of silence. Silence is a non-event, a lack of action – and that’s certainly what people do NOT pay for at their local fleapit. I remember watching the beginning of Jodie Foster's space opus Contact at my local emporium – we pan away from Earth through our Galaxy to the accompaniment of radio waves, the further we get the more they diminish, until we are left with images of cosmic grandeur to the strains of
well, absolute silence. This goes on for enough time that the audience gets shifty. What once was silence is now the sound of creaking chairs and muffled coughs. You can feel a palpable sigh of relief when the ponderous soundtrack crashes back in.
Silence really makes an audience vulnerable; it’s as merciless as a spotlight in its exposure. I find the most amounts of tension generated in cinema are often the quietest, when the audience is disturbed by a moment of statis. Horror films usually try and scare us with theatrical or technological events – usually signposted by a cacophonous score. A composer of such horror always looks to either Penderecki or Ligeti – by which I’m sure they’re flattered ("Hey Krystov, you know your music’s great for slashing girls up to"). But the most successful are usually the most restrained – Carpenter's needling repetition, Howard Shore's slow build up of material, Babalamenti's disturbing cross stylisation. Of course there are times when absolute overkill works – Goblin's scores for Dario Argento's pictures turn them into gaudy horror operas.
However what really gets the hair on the back of my head standing on end is the sound of an audience caught in the headlights of silence, when the music’s not shouting at you, you don’t know were to run. However I don’t see non-music soundtracks taking off. There are a lot of hungry composers in Hollywood.
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