How Horror Sounds

Watching the director make Dreamcatcher scary is a grim business. Our correspondent faces up to it

Do you have more splintering? IS there anything like 'straining at the door panel?'" asks Lawrence Kasdan. His sound designer, Bob Grieve, suggests that the music is too loud; the audience won't catch the kind of maple-busting noise Kasdan is looking for. Kasdan won't have it. That's because he knows that horror isn't so much shot as constructed. Even the most artful scared face looks stupid on the big screen if the computer-generated monster is cheesy, the sound effects flat, the silences too short or the cuts too slow. So compared with the rush of filming, say, My Dinner with Andre,...

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