Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Since film, horror, and audio are all things I enjoy and part of how I help myself fall asleep at night these days, I wanted something that would utilize auditory effects in terms of horror. Perhaps it's because I'm missing my old days of writing psychedelic drone while tripping, but there is definitely a certain set of sonic frequencies that under the right conditions can be absolutely next-level otherworldly terrifying to the human mind. Which is how and why I used to write psychedelic drone. I knew I hit the nail on the head when the music that I wrote would scare even me as the writer.
Regrettably, this film does not capture that. It DOES however, capture a bit of the ambience of it. A dash of some dark comedy, the story is set in a more retro setting and based on older days of analog recordings and filmmaking. It's a story of a man who flies out to Italy from the UK to work on the sound effects department of a horror film, a genre which he's not normally accustomed to, and how doing so is a rather cerebral experience for him.
It's actually really interesting for anyone curious about how sound effects and whatnot used to be made in the older days for retro horror material. With the sounds of a head of lettuce being sloshed around under water, and the bubbling of blowing through a straw to create bubbles being examples shown to simulate the sound effects of a drowning scene being shown to give the history to some of it. Along with auditory recordings of various stabbings and choppings of other food products for their respective scenes in the film that they are making, in the Berberian Sound Studio.
Eventually in history and at some point an actual sort of music box or a sound effects box was created which gave way to many classic horror movie sound effects. And while I can't remember the name of it off of the top of my head, if you're into horror at all or audio/video production or both, this is a fun little watch. However I will admit that the film is very niche in this respect, in that while it's neither particularly scary nor is it all that obscure, perhaps it will fall flat on the average horror buff if they don't understand the actual a/v production history. I will however, give the film credit, in that it does a great job at recapturing old retro Italian horror styles of cinematography and camera work. THAT was a nice little surprise. I didn't really realize what I was getting into with that until about a quarter of the way through the film when I began to realize that the art style it's shot in, is intentionally reminiscent of a throwback to things like Suspiria. Aaaannddddd now I'm probably gonna go listen to Goblin's Roller album again and rewatch Suspiria later. lol.