The scariest movies don't care if you close your eyes

This relationship between sound and psychological isolation found a direct expression in writer-director Peter Strickland’s headfirst dive into the surrealistic breakdown of the boundaries between films and filmmaking: Berberian Sound Studio. Toby Jones plays the timid sound engineer Gilderoy, who finds himself in over his head when he takes a job in Italy to work on a tawdry exploitation horror film about witches. Strickland never shows this film to the audience, instead making a film purely interested in the behind-the-scenes mechanics of its production—and in how Gilderoy slowly begins to lose his mind as his sound work destabilizes his reality. Even when he’s the one creating the effects, the sounds of violence and terror overwhelm his psyche. As viewers, we watch Gilderoy smash a melon and recoil at the noise it produces, suggesting that a horrifying sound retains its power even when its source is fully exposed, unlike a nasty piece of makeup, which can be neutralized once you see the seams.

That idea is amplified when you consider films that don’t have a story-based focus on sound, yet nonetheless make the aural experience the main attraction. A strain of lo-fi, atmospheric horror distills these ideas most purely, with Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink being the most notable example. The film is founded on lonesomeness and a sense of agonizing, immersive dread, all built directly from its stark, hair-raising sound design.

Ball’s film is light on plot; its story is outwardly about a pair of children who wake up in the middle of the night to find their father missing and the home’s doors disappearing. The children are left to fend for themselves within the asphyxiating unease of a house that appears to be trapping them with an unexplainable presence. This is rendered as something like an extended, frightful ambient drone, filmed through prolonged sequences of little or slow-moving action, more focused on the sensorial experiences of becoming enmeshed in its hostile soundscape while the camera surveys perfect stillness. 

Many scenes in Skinamarink frame the two children, slightly obscured from full view, as they huddle around the glow of a CRT television, only for the camera to cut to an extended sequence observing an unremarkable junction between the wall and ceiling. Where Ball finds the terror is in the muffled, obscure sounds of activity within the house. Suddenly, the anodyne becomes petrifying—the combination of odd thumping, television static, ghostly whispering, and extended digital humming turns the normalcy of a dark suburban home into something alien and foreboding. Skinamarink‘s brand of analog horror is intimate and intrusive, with fear built out of an active awareness that viewers can avert their eyes but not their ears. The film seems custom-designed to be watched alone with headphones on, so that the unforgiving mood creeps right into your skin. It’s horror ASMR. 

Ball is actively drawing on other forms of analog horror—now more popularized in niche online spaces with projects like The Backrooms—while the overall style references video-era frights like The Blair Witch Project, as well as the dreamlike films of David Lynch. While the latter built memorable, unsettling soundscapes to create an immersive instability within the surreal stories of his characters, the former is another film that uses its aural signals as its crux for generating terror, since it famously never shows much on screen. Though The Blair Witch Project has its share of iconic images, it’s the use of diegetic, naturalistic audio that terrifies us, as viewers come to feel as helplessly lost as the characters, confined by the smothering expanse of the woods. The sound design is meant to create a sense of realism, with the group of amateur documentarians’ mental deterioration never set to a score or even to any ambient tone. Instead, it’s the swaying of trees, the snapping of twigs, and the amplified quiet that leaves you imagining the entity that could be stalking the characters.

The sounds of The Blair Witch Project become more candidly supernatural later on, when the characters hear laughing children and other bizarre effects. But even then, the audience is encouraged to theorize about the possibility of a natural phenomenon; perhaps the crew is being cruelly pranked by rogue youths or a group of sadistic rednecks. The sounds surround both viewer and characters, boxing them in, challenging assumptions and forcing speculation. Eventually, we see more, but understand less because of what we hear, just like the characters. In the final scene, petrified Heather (Heather Donahue) and Mike (Michael C. Williams) investigate a decrepit, abandoned house, with Heather shooting on silent 16mm film, meaning all the audio comes from Mike’s DVC camera while cross-cutting between the two. When the characters are separated, their relationship to their own voices is obfuscated—the sounds of Heather’s screams echo far away from her point-of-view footage. The sound fractures spatial logic and distorts the characters’ sense of self, and unmoors the audience from even this film’s earlier, unstable sense of reality.

This style of jarring horror, built on meticulous sound design focused on separating its audience from its comfort zone, is only becoming a more prominent aesthetic in an era increasingly defined by solitude—alone, online, submerged into our own worlds through screens and earbuds. Just as these films are shaped by seclusion, whether through poring over podcast recordings or watching alienating experimental horror videos, so too do they reflect a culture that consumes fear in private. It’s a form of horror that persists through the intimacy of listening, one that crawls into your brain to tell you it isn’t going away, that refuses to dissipate just because you close your eyes.