TORTURE
Prisoners (D. Villeneuve, 2013)
Similarly to our film, Prisoners deals with family, captivity and torture. There is ample suspense drawn from the whodunnit mystery of the abductor but also a constant air of dread that envelopes the mood of the film regarding the fate of the girls, and indeed the wrongly imprisoned suspect Alex (Paul Dano) who is tortured in desperation for answers by Hugh Jackman's Keller. The bleak, desaturated cinematography combined with Johann Johannson's starkly ambient score has an unnerving resonance that reflects the psychology of the characters as they deal with this horrible situation.
Only God Forgives (N. Winding Refn, 2013)
I found Only God Forgives to be entirely an exercise in mood. With minimal dialogue and little narrative or character development, the film instead uses ambient neon set pieces and Martinez' brooding score create the atmosphere and outlook for the characters.
Much like the rest of the film this disturbing torture scene is hyperstylised and surreal in the way all the women are made to close their eyes. There is tension in the silence it plays out in, interrupted only by the man's screams as he is skewered. Close ups of the acts are used sparingly, giving maximum effect as it leaves the rest to the imagination, cutting away to other people in the room and letting the sound fill in the rest.
Martinez noted (2014) "The audience will look to the music and sound and images to get its cues if [the characters in the film] don’t say anything. There are three stoics in this film who are not emotionally very demonstrative."I don't think I would have enjoyed the film without his score, with notable thai influences it holds the piece together and is suitably dark.
Martinez, C. (2014). The accompanist: Cliff Martinez on scoring for Soderbergh, Winding Refn et al.Sight and Sound. [online] Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/accompanist-cliff-martinez-scoring-soderbergh-winding [Accessed 1 May. 2014].
Under The Skin (J. Glazer, 2013)
Similarly to Only God Forgives, this is a mood oriented piece with scarce dialogue. It is reflective and expressive primarily through the excellent sound design of Johnnie Burn, and Mica Levy's chilling, modernist score. Making use of live and processed instrumentation, her strings are at times both seductive and sinister, befitting of Scarlett Johansson's character. The cinematography is both bleak and breathtaking, reflecting Glazer's background in music videos, with intimate close-ups and the most extreme long-shots used to depict the isolation and loneliness of the characters and setting.
The film features a lot of natural interactions with non-actors using hidden cameras. And much of the sound captured was natural as well, with Burn disguising microphones as headphones and an umbrella to covertly obtain the city's natural ambience."I got a hacksaw out, chopped that off and stuck the microphone in its place. I went and tried it down Oxford Street and it's great because people obviously don’t expect an umbrella is a microphone, so I spent a good week or two wandering around Glasgow just pointing my umbrella at things."
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19187/1/how-to-create-an-alien-soundscape
http://dazed-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/article-files/19187-UTS-SD-W-24-rvsd.pdf
This article offers a great deal of insight into their production process, how they used an anechoic chamber to create the void where Johansson devours her victims and includes a timeline pdf so you can see how the project developed and unfolded.
Burn, J. (2014). How to create an alien soundscape Under the Skin's sound designer and music producer on how they created an ethereal symphony. Dazed. [online] Available at: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19187/1/how-to-create-an-alien-soundscape [Accessed 3 Mar. 2014].
Game of Thrones S03E02
Game of Thrones has never been one to shy away from gore, but this torture scene goes for subtlety instead. Similarly in our film the person being tortured does not know why this is happening, and the silence here lets the dread and confusion of the character be conveyed.
Kill List (B. Wheatley, 2011)
Kill list served as a big inspiration for Into the Woods, and I already mentioned the torture scene in a previous post, but I will reiterate here.
This scene is made all the more tense by its use of silence in the score, and the subsequent impact sounds are all the more painful in their loudness. The visuals are sparing with the close ups, leaving most of the hand-maiming to just out of frame until the money shot. As with Sightseers (2012) Martin Pavey's sound design in Wheatley's films leaves little to the imagination, with gore and impact sounds foregrounded prominently in the mix, something I tend to emulate in my own works.
Frontiers (X. Gens, 2007)
Frontiers is brutal and unforgiving with it's torture, which is beyond gratuitous. It is similarly committed by a quaint family (who turn out to be Nazis) in a rural location. It becomes a relentless bombardment of nastiness towards the end but is well executed on the whole despite a rigid following of genre conventions.
Inbred (A. Chandon. 2011)
Though a ludicrous exaggeration of rural Yorkshire (it was filmed not far from my hometown), the performances add a great deal of realism to the film and manage to elevate it above b-movie status. I did find some of the foley/mixing to sound a little artificial once my attention was drawn to it, and the score was fairly typical. The film was frustrating in that the characters made stupid decisions resulting in their deaths which is horrors most annoying cliche.
Irreversible (G. Noe 2002)
The Film effectively tells the story achronologically, with the brutal firehydrant murder becoming mercifully justified once the rape is revealed to have been the reason for it. The rape is horrible, unfolding in one long unbroken take with the camera bringing the audience to floor level. This scene also unfolds in brutal silence, and the harsh reality of her powerlessness is made all the worse when someone enters and walks away from the scene.
Reservoir Dogs (Q.Tarantino 1992)
In this infamous scene the torture of a cop is juxtaposed with Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen)'s psychotic dancing to 'Stuck in the Middle With You' on the radio. The camera pans away as his ear is sliced of with a razor, leaving the action itself to the audiences imagination.
True Detective (C. Fukunaga, 2014)
By far the most captivating television series I have possibly ever seen, True Detective follows a murder investigation spanning twenty years in rural Louisiana. Despite the murders and disappearances having ties to a satanist cult the focus of the show is very much on the fractious relationship of Marty (Woody Harrelson) and Rust (Matthew Mcconaughey). The character development and the way the narrative unfolds through analepsis is enthralling as the gaps from their stories are gradually filled in. The show is quite self aware and celebrates and subverts the tropes of the detective/thriller genre. The Music is brooding, and builds suitable tension and can be accordingly disturbing. The sound design manipulates the atmosphere of the swampy environments rife with crickets to the point it becomes hallucinatory. The Yellow king's house is very isolated and as creepy as they come, and hopefully we will be able to capture a similar essence in our own location. Finally this masterful technical craftsmanship is one of the most impressive feats in recent television, a 6 minute tracking shot in one take. wow.
Hannibal (2013-)
Though the show's frequent gruesome tableaus push suspension of disbelief that such murders could be so common place away from any sense of realism, the world these characters inhabit has an entirely dream [nightmare] like quality about it. Much of the exposition comes in the for of hallucinatory visions and suggestions, easing the audience into the subjective experience of Will Graham's (Hugh Dancy) fractious mind. The cinematography is at times, astounding, but has a constantly bleak and foreboding tone about it, especially evidenced by the stark colour palette. That is, at least until we enter Hannibal's (Mads Mikkelsen) sanctuary. Like the character, it is dark, with a rich warmth that denotes his taste for the finer things, disguising the desires for his true taste. His cooking scenes are shot with playful, mouth-watering gratuity, as he fixes up rare cuisines that only the audience are privy as to the true ingredients.
These scenes are generally complimented with elegant classical music. But what really sets this show apart from other killer-related shows is the sound design throughout the rest of the episodes. A constant air of discomfort is established through eerie, disjointed percussion. Subtle at times with thumps, chimes and rattles and unrelenting at others with dissonant strings, synth and harp notes thrown in the mix to add to the unease, which compliments the cerebral nature of the show's characters and the psychological games at play.
As with 'Into the Woods' I hope to use percussion in a similar fashion, to generate unease and to facilitate tension as necessary.
Berberian Sound Studio (P. Strickland, 2012)
As both a sound designer and a fan of directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci this was a joy to watch, not only for the reverence for the Italian giallo genre on display, but the way in which the craft of sound mixing on analogue technology was shot with such lingering affection. Much of the psychological tension is highlighted through a diagetic score the characters impose on their own film, of which we see very little. The horror instead comes through suggestion as fruit and vegetables are brutalised by foley artists, something I myself experienced working on a film last year.
