We know by now, how truly vital sound design is in a film but it is even more so in the horror and thriller genres. For an instance, in Hush, the protagonist is a deaf woman who’s being terrorised by a masked attacker. Mike Flanagan has used the sound technique that Hitchcock often used in his films; the absence of sound. Although we see the film from a third-person perspective, we hear it through her ears, which makes all the difference. Once out of sight, the fact that we know the attacker could just come at her with an axe screaming profanities and she’d simply have no clue until the blade of the axe makes contact with her skin is quite frightful.
This film had minimal dialogue and thus the emphasis was on sound. And though there are very simple sounds; door creaking, footsteps, wind and so on, making it seem simple is anything but simple. In an interview, Flanagan spoke about how most of the production audio just had to be used as a guide track. The first round of sound design simply consisted of Kate (protagonist) breathing in different ways for a couple of hours. Now you can imagine how many rounds they had to go through until the final product. The Quiet, Hear No Evil and even Midnight are a few more examples that more or less follow the same paradigm of sound design when it comes to portraying deaf people through this genre.
One of the few techniques that make more of an impact in films like these is juxtaposition. Almost all films that have deaf characters as one of their main protagonists show the juxtaposition of the soundless lives of the deaf and the auditorily rich lives of folks with sound hearing. It acts as a constant reminder to viewers about the silent lives they could never even begin to imagine. Coda is a fine example of this.
Naoko Yamada’s A Silent Voice takes a different approach, showing us what someone’s deafness does to the people around them. We see the pain and helplessness felt by the people who care about Nishimiya feel.
Sound of Metal uses sound design differently to show deafness, so much so that it is painfully vicarious. Nicolas Becker, known for the sound design of Gravity, helmed this film. He manipulated the original scene’s sound in post-production and enhanced the emotional communication of this film. Perhaps the biggest reason we empathised with Ruben’s character, is because as viewers, we are experiencing the same things as Ruben.
There is a frustration many of us will never understand that comes with having any disability. It could be something chronic, something you’re born with, or something that happened to you. Not hearing a single sound seems unimaginable to many of us, and rightly so. Each of these films, encapsulates in its own way, what it feels like to be deaf.
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