The Hardest Horror Movie Sound I Ever Foley-ed

October 28, 2022 8:12 AM

Ahead of Halloween, Vulture asked Foley artists to answer the question [Marilee] Yorston commonly fields: What is the hardest sound you’ve ever had to perform in a horror project? The answers ranged from the yowls of a disembodied spirit to the exact gushing of a head exploded from the inside by a discharged fire extinguisher. (archive.ph link)
posted by Etrigan (26 comments total)

Every time I read about Foley, I wish I could have taken it up as a career.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:53 AM on October 28, 2022 [10 favorites]

Many moons ago I wrote an article about Jack Foley himself, and two things I loved learning about him:

1. Foley was hanging around in the editing room for some reason when Stanley Kubrick was reviewing some of the location footage for Spartacus. And for the scene where a bunch of slaves in leg irons were being marched somewhere, the sound was completely shot - there was no take that was useable. Kubrick was fretting about having to fly everyone back to Spain for re-shoots, but Foley said "Lemme see if I can help." And he pulled out a keychain and starting fiddling around with it, and came up with a way to jingle the keys on the chain that worked for the scene.

2. There was another film Foley was working on about a fantastical submarine that called for "a funny motor sound". Foley recorded himself belching, put that in reverse and put that sound in a continuous loop.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:36 AM on October 28, 2022 [25 favorites]

Fans of very cerebral, surreal, and slow-build horror might enjoy Berberian Sound Studio. It's about a Foley artist for a Giallo film
posted by treepour at 10:20 AM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

One of my favorite stories about Christopher Lee was that time he taught Peter Jackson what a stabbing sounds like.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:34 AM on October 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mrs. Sauce and I did a great AirBNB experience in LA just before the pandemic. We had an evening hangout with a Hollywood foley guy at his home studio. He walked us through the process of recording and tracking foley, showed us the TV show he was currently working on ... a network cop drama heavy with stompy boots and harness jangle. He also made a silly swordfight short film with us and put lots of schling and clang and sloppy wet stabbings on it. He taught us that handshakes have sounds. Listen carefully, you'll hear it, I can't stop hearing it.

The most memorable thing he shared with us: whenever you hear wet kissing, that's a foley guy sucking on his arm. He'd just finished a season of Orange is the New Black and his arm was full of fading lady prison sex hickies.

(and yeah, foley guys are all guys, per our guy. Tiny business that you have to network your way into.)
posted by Sauce Trough at 11:51 AM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]

(and yeah, foley guys are all guys, per our guy. Tiny business that you have to network your way into.)

lol. telling you I didn't read the article without saying I didn't read the article.
posted by Sauce Trough at 12:33 PM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

When I was in college, Andy Moorer (responsible for the THX deep note sound) came to campus and gave a talk about Foley work and sound in movies. He made movies both endearing and rotten for me. For example, he spoke about how he walked into a Foley stage and they were throwing squid at a wall. He also said if you pay attention, you'll see a huge number of cars squealing tires, even on dirt roads.

He talked about how the sound of someone being punched in the nose used to be done. To start, they would record a mike in a vacuum hose to get the sound of the fist flying through the air, then for the initial slap of impact, they used a small caliber handgun. For the subsequent crunch they would drop a melon from a second story window. The sound of the body hitting the ground was a box of boxing gloves getting dumped out. Moorer claimed that the fruit growing region of California would have gone out of business if it weren't for Hollywood studios buying up melons for westerns.

One of my favorite stories was working on Apocalypse Now. To get the "right" sound of ordinance, they got a hold of people who collected period weapons and ammunition. They went out in the middle of nowhere and fired off weapons while the recording engineer got it all on tape. The recording engineer had two mics that he was holding up and a recorder hung from his neck and he would look down at the recording levels. A rocket misfired and hit their van and ricocheted back right in front of the recording engineer. As it went by, he said "sheeeeeeeet" panning from one side to the other. That ended up in the movie.

My oldest brother had a job at Lucasfilm and on the day he started, he got to see them mixing the scene where they pull the heart out of the guy's chest to get it just the right amount of juicy. He also got to be in the final crowd scene of Howard the Duck. They grabbed everyone they could find and got them to chant "Howard! Howard! Howard!".
posted by plinth at 12:46 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]

Am I the only person driven crazy by over -Foley? Every sword sounds like it's metal on metal, , even when it hits a tree. Every swing is a giant WHOOSH. Every car tire screeches, even when it really wouldn't. Shoes don't all CLICK CLICK CLICK. There's so much overdone it detracts. And is EVERY hawk a red tail screech? Calm down you guys.
posted by cccorlew at 1:38 PM on October 28, 2022 [17 favorites]

All that effort in horror movies to come up with the oh, so perfect sound, and the closed captioning will simply read "squelches."
posted by kimota at 1:40 PM on October 28, 2022 [13 favorites]

Metafilter: Some people think it's pedestrian to just go to the celery
posted by taquito sunrise at 1:46 PM on October 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

(*exact gushing of a head exploded from the inside by squeezing of Cyclopean tube of toothpaste*
posted by y2karl at 1:47 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

cccorlew, you are definitely not alone. Ugh, especially in kissing scenes! I am grossed out by kissing as a concept and probably some part of that is that before I tried it I thought of it as such an inescapably squelchy interaction due to years of TV and movie watching. In my experience IRL kissing is usually not quite such a noisy affair.
posted by potrzebie at 1:48 PM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

I feel like this is the job for real world Los Espookys.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:57 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

In my experience IRL kissing is usually not quite such a noisy affair.

How do you tell someone you're doing something wrong without saying you're doing it wrong?

(kidding!)
posted by hippybear at 1:58 PM on October 28, 2022

I do enjoy pavement screeching tires on gravel roads. One of my favorite sound effect uses. And it's nearly everywhere, esp lazy television.
posted by hippybear at 1:59 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the overfoleying is part and parcel of crappy modern sound design.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:17 PM on October 28, 2022

howl's moving castle isn't in my top five ghibli films, but the foley work is outstanding. clearly, care taken with the emotional elements.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:25 PM on October 28, 2022

yeah, foley sounds overdone to me nowadays but I'm at the age where the world gets noisier and dumber every day, so I don't know if its a me problem or a foley problem.

Lucha Underground had some outrageous foley too. They would pump up the wrestling moves with massive fake foley. some of the slaps in that show sounded like someone throwing a snare drum full of hamburger off a high-rise. this is funny to me because when you see a wrestler like say Penta el ziero miedo live, that kind of guy has no trouble throwing slaps that can be heard (and felt!) in the back row of the arena.

just watched El Topo in the theater and I loled at some of the goofier foley work there. Every sound was massively foregrounded. I don't know enough about Jodorosky to know if this was intentional or accidental.
posted by Sauce Trough at 4:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

I hate it when they foley in the sound of people swallowing. Do they have no sympathy for those of us who can’t stand eating noises? And why do we have to hear it? Most of the time in real life I don’t hear people swallowing every time they take a sip of water.

I do enjoy videos of foley artists at work.
posted by Well I never at 4:18 PM on October 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

I love foleyed footsteps. LOVE THEM. Often I'll be watching an older movie online with my brother and we'll start discussing like "Oh, these are prime 1970s footsteps, lots of grit in the sound" or "Definitely more 1980s, very clean and clicky".
posted by theatro at 4:30 PM on October 28, 2022 [8 favorites]

Since it is close to Halloween, I can tell you how to make a really horrible sound. I was at this new job, but I knew someone there who I used to work with and joke around with. I had this little scream sound--maybe 1/4 second at most, that I brought in and I was going to have play remotely on his PC in the lab.

But this company had Sun workstations. The sound wouldn't play! I went home and found a sound conversion program that could convert from anything to anything else. It could convert to a format that a Sun workstation would recognize.

The next morning I went in early and tried it on my desk workstation. I had never played a sound on this workstation and didn't realize that the sound was set to maximum and I didn't know how to change that.

It started playing, but it was all wrong. It played it really-really slowly. Instead of a scream, it sounded like some horrible low moaning of a soul that has been burning in hell for centuries and there is nothing left but pain and suffering.

I scrambled around the workstation. Stop! Stop! But I couldn't get the program to stop, and the stupid workstation was actually bolted to the table so I couldn't get to the speaker cables in the back. It painfully moaned on and on, then finally stopped.

I sat on the floor so I couldn't be seen. This was a huge room filled with rows of cubicles. Since it was early I had only heard a few conversations here and there around the building. But now, there were no conversations. It was dead silent. Finally I heard, very loudly, 'WHAT...WAS...THAT???!!!

I was scared that they'd walk the rows of cubicles to find the guilty party but they never did. Maybe they were too afraid to. Finally I heard more people arriving to work, so I finally just sat up at my desk like I had just arrived.

Now, many years later, I can still hear that painful moaning in my head.
posted by eye of newt at 1:23 AM on October 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

Jacques Tati, Mon Oncle.

That is all.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:38 AM on October 29, 2022

Am I the only person driven crazy by over -Foley? Every sword sounds like it's metal on metal, even when it hits a tree. Every swing is a giant WHOOSH. Every car tire screeches, even when it really wouldn't. Shoes don't all CLICK CLICK CLICK. There's so much overdone it detracts. And is EVERY hawk a red tail screech? Calm down you guys.

It's partly because clichés - even sonic ones - are easy and well-understood shorthand. It's (relatively) easier and faster to rub two bars of metal together for that sword "schiiing!" etc, than to try to do a more realistic set of sounds that are acceptable to the director. Ditto for car FX and so on. And many of the over-used sounds aren't actually Foley (a human performing the sounds in sync with picture) but sound effects grabbed from a library, and pasted in by an editor, which is cheaper.

As already mentioned, people now expect many sounds to be cliché - punches, gunshots, cars, kissing etc. To match the scenery-chewing cliché acting of most budget productions.

That red-tailed hawk sound? I suspect that's now an in-joke, like the Wilhelm Scream. Another that bugs me is the use of a loon call in utterly inappropriate outdoors scenes, like a desert or a jungle.

(I worked for several years on the hardware side of post-production. A fascinating industry)
posted by Artful Codger at 1:09 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's a charming Italian movie from the early 1990s, Volere Volare (To Want To Fly), about a sound-collector and foley guy who creates the sound effects for cartoons. I won't go into the details of the plot but there's a scene where he's brought in to do foley on a high-budget softcore porn movie and the results are... not what the producers were expecting.
posted by Hogshead at 2:51 PM on October 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

cccorlew, you are most certainly not alone in that feeling. I work as a production sound mixer (meaning on-set and location sound recording) for film and television, and my partner is a post-producer/story producer/editor type. We have occasional light-hearted arguments about the (in my opinion) overuse of foley in things she is working on or things we watch. Part of the issue is that if she doesn’t put that dumb, unnecessary foghorn sound effect in, she’ll just get a note later from some executive producer saying to do so.

I work on and enjoy watching a lot of documentaries, and that’s where I tend to have a more serious problem with this stuff, particularly when there’s a bunch of obviously new sound put under old archival footage. Terribly distracting, and I think it’s ethically problematic as well, though I am an outlier with that opinion.

eye of newt, that is fantastic. Here is something you may enjoy:
posted by zoinks at 5:33 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Part of the issue is that if she doesn’t put that dumb, unnecessary foghorn sound effect in, she’ll just get a note later from some executive producer saying to do so.

... exactly.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:03 AM on October 30, 2022