Sound in Thriller films

Sound is a very important aspect of thriller films; it helps to build suspense and tension to encourage the audience to feel frightened. This is why I am researching the sound because it will help me establish which types of sounds are best for our film.

Music is often used to build up to something scary that is about to happen, the most common sounds used in thrillers are dark eerie sounds. The music will start off slow paced and then start speeding up as the scary part approaches, this helps to create suspense and tension in the scene and helps encourage the audience to feel scared.

A lot of thriller films, along with many other genres, use no diegetic music. Thriller films use this music to build tension and suspense in the scene and create a sound bridge, a scene won’t have as much tension in it if it is just talking or silence when something is about to happen, so thriller films often use this. An example of how this has been used is in the shower scene in Psycho, they used loud screeching music just as the woman was about to be stabbed, this built a lot of tension and suspense and overall made the film more exciting and gripping to watch. 

Another use of non diegetic sound in thrillers is in action scenes, there tends to be fast paced music to add to the suspense and excitement of the scene. This also makes the scene better to watch and more exciting/gripping for the audience. The fast paced music keeps the flow of the scene and also helps create tension.

Diegetic sound such as dialogue is used a lot in thriller films (however some less than others), this gives the audience more of an insight into the characters. Also other diegetic music like background noise (maybe a TV in the background) is used to help create realism in the film. However, some thriller films us extreme silence to build up tension so when something happens that is loud, it really stands out, also when it is silent, the audience will most likely start listening more quietly to try and here anything that’s happening in the scene which makes it even more scary when there’s suddenly a loud noise after a extreme silence.

We are going to combine our research for thriller films and mystery films to ensure we incorporate both genres into our films.