But, does it SOUND creepy?

When looking into popular horror title sequences, such as "Psycho" and "The Shining", one thing the both of them have in common is music/noise that kind of makes the hair on your arms stand up. I keep mentioning the suspense element, but that is because in a clip this short, it seems really important to make sure we have that element down. This is the same no matter what form of murder we collectively agree on.

In "Psycho", the music is said to "set the tone" of "something horrific" happening after the credits. The music is high pitched, and almost screeching to an extent. When I researched it, I found that the music's purpose was to foreshadow the "psychotic state" of the killer. Now, how can this be useful? This type of foreshadowing gives us a lot of room to determine if we can work out something similar- if the music we choose can somehow reflect our killer's mental state, or his character. Not only would we be able to give excessive meaning through visual images, but also audio codes.


Now, in "The Shining" the opening sequence is just one, long tracking/aerial shot with non-diegetic sound. This is different then the shorter shots in "Psycho", but in "Psycho" there are only shots with the names of people. The music in "The Shining" seems to build up in intensity slowly, which causes anxiety in the viewer to peak, also. The raising intensity makes the viewer expect for something intense to happen in consequence to the sound. This technique of sound could be useful if we were to do a tracking shot down a hallway-- given, it wouldn't be as long of a shot, but we could still utilize the aspect of building up the intensity of the music to correspond with the context.



Source Links:
https://celluloidwickerman.com/2013/12/30/analysis-of-sound-and-music-in-alfred-hitchcocks-psycho-1960-part-2-an-audiovisual-foreshadowing/
http://roobla.com/the-shining-opening-2/