Music In Horror Films Analysis

Missing the thrill

Can deaf people enjoy horror films?

Introduction

Renowned film critic Roger Ebert describes “Scream” as self-deconstructing; “it 's like one of those cans that heats its own soup”. He goes on to say "As a film critic, I liked it. I liked the in-jokes and the self-aware characters. At the same time, I was aware of the incredible level of gore in this film. It is really violent”(Riley 94). Since I have never been a fan of horror films, this was never going to be an assignment that I would relish. But having watched many parts of the film and read reviews about it, I concluded that the film represents a major milestone in the horror film industry. Any one attempting to subtitle this film, myself included, for the deaf and hard

He has said that "Music in horror films is probably more powerful than in any other genre, so it’s good for a composer to do them because he can be very influential on the action"(Thorley 2012).Because the key objective of horror films is to frighten its audience, it seems very difficult, perhaps impossible to achieve this emotional affect only through the images, even with written subtitles that may describe to a limited degree the intensity of the situation. In his book “Why we watch, the attraction of violent entertainment”, Geffrey Goldstein carried out an experiment in which three violent documentaries were shown to three test groups. In all cases, the viewers lost interest and stopped watching at different durations of viewing. He says: “One striking difference between our films (the documentaries) and a commercial horror film is the quality of the sound track. Our films had the kind of sound typical of inexpensive documentary productions: No music, no special effects, and dialogue and voice over without the vibrancy and diction that trained actors produce with the help of a good sound lab. It seems possible that unappealing sound track made our films unappealing” (Goldstein

In her article titled Music to my eyes: Neves quotes Petit (2003) “of the two main elements of music, melody and rhythm, they [deaf children] could perfectly understand the second, in other words, they could have access to 50% of music and, if we consider that in some cultures rhythm in itself is an artistic expression, there is a large field for doing music work with deaf students” (Neves 124). Neves sees the translator as an important factor in helping the deaf make sense of the audio material included in the film, not only the dialogue: “In SDH this balance is hard to achieve. Translating contextually occurring sound and music into written language will demand transcoding expertise that will pull the translator between the intended meaning of the acoustic messages, their function in the text and the effect any rendering may produce on the deaf viewer” (125). This means we can safely say that deaf viewers gather at least 50% of the music and sound effects of films if they are properly translated by a professional SDH