1408

1408

I watched the movie 1408 the other night and found it to be quite enjoyable. 1408 is a movie about an author (John Cusac) who writes books about haunted places who spends the night in, what Samuel L. Jackson calls “A real Fu*king evil room!”.
Not being a big fan of horror flicks, I wasn’t too stoked about watching this film, so I focused my attention on the audio and began to think about my sound and cinema class. It wasn’t long before I began to hear all kinds of innovative amazing things.
Basically, the protagonist’s experience in the room is something like a very intense, very bad, LSD trip. He is actually convinced for a time that Samuel L. Jackson had secretly “dosed” him with the drug. Although this wasn’t the case, the night was filled with some very scary and very well done auditory hallucinations.
During one scene, shortly after the room begins to take hold of John Cusac, he caused to believe that he has gone deaf. While the expressions on John’s face began to show panic and confusion, the sound of an intense high pitched whine begins to grow louder and louder while the ambient, non-diagetic sounds of the hotel room and the city outside fade out. A moment later, while John is shown screaming out the window, only very low, muffled frequencies can be heard. I believe some type of filtering was used to filter out all high and midrange frequencies. The effect was executed perfectly and is and excellent example of using “first person audio” to achieve movie magic!
During another scene, John believes he hears a baby crying on the other side of a wall, as he listens closer to the wall the sound of the baby’s screams begin too echo and exponentially increase in volume. As John falls to the floor holding his ears the amount of reverb and delay on the looped cry continues to increase before fading away in an otherworldly fashion. I found the scene to be very scary and was surprised that such a terrifying moment could be achieved when the only visual stimulus was some dude standing in a normal looking hotel room. : )
I just want to say that 1408 is a pretty good scary movie, and uses sound in some very fun and very spooky ways.