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Sound Design Strategy

4 min read

Sound Design Strategy

Core Principle

This film listens.

The sound design is organized around a single productive principle: the house absorbs sound rather than produces it. Where horror films add sound to the horror space — creaks, whispers, bass drones — this film subtracts. The house is quieter than it should be. The absence is the signal.

The House’s Ambient Texture

What the House Sounds Like

The Bronx house has a specific ambient texture that is consistent throughout the film and distinct from every other location:

  • Reduced ambient noise: The house is slightly quieter than the street outside, slightly quieter than the Staten Island apartment, significantly quieter than transit. This is a real acoustic property of old, insulated houses — walls absorb exterior noise. The film uses this property deliberately.
  • Interior sounds at specific register: Floorboards, the sound of the building’s pipes, the HVAC or radiator — these are present but below threshold. They are felt more than heard.
  • The basement: The quietest space in the film. When the film is inside the basement room, the ambient texture drops further. This is not supernatural — basements are naturally acoustic voids. The film uses the natural property and commits to it.

The Threshold Quality

The sound design’s most important tool is the transition: the moment of entering and leaving the house. As characters cross the threshold:

  • Entering: ambient noise from the street reduces; the house’s specific texture replaces it; the audience should register this as a physical sensation
  • Leaving: the house’s quiet is replaced by the street’s life; a release that should also register

This transition — house to outside, outside to house — should be designed with care in every scene that crosses it.

Character Sound Design

Kendrie

Kendrie’s scenes carry less ambient noise than average. This is a consistent choice: her scenes in the house are sonically slightly more reduced, as though she is listening harder, as though less is audible to the world when she is most present.

When the house is “reaching” Kendrie (if we agree to describe it that way), the sound design’s primary tool is absence: ambient sound stops, briefly, below the threshold of conscious attention, before resuming. Not silence. A specific reduction. A breath held.

Charlize

Charlize’s scenes are at normal ambient levels — she has not (yet) tuned into what Kendrie hears. Her sound world is more populated, more external. As the film progresses and Charlize begins to lose access to her own certainty, the sound design of her scenes should begin to approximate Kendrie’s — gradually, below conscious threshold.

Music

Approach

Sparse and diegetic-first. The film’s preference is for music that exists in the world of the film — a radio, a phone speaker, the specific sound of music coming through a wall — rather than non-diegetic score.

If score is used: Instrumental. String-based, possibly with prepared piano. No electronic manipulation of voices or environmental sounds — this is a common horror tool and this film refuses it. The score, if any, should support the film’s atmospheric register without providing emotional instructions.

What the Score Does Not Do

  • No stingers (sudden loud music cued to a scare)
  • No bass drones designed to make the audience anxious
  • No music that tells the audience what to feel about the house
  • No music in the basement scenes — the basement scenes should be in silence, or as close to silence as is acoustically possible

Transit Sound Design

The transit sequences are the film’s loudest. The specific soundscape of NYC transit:

  • Subway: track noise, braking, announcement systems, ambient conversation, the specific acoustic quality of different lines and stations
  • Ferry: engines, water, wind, the horn, the specific acoustic quality of an open vessel on open water

See NYC Transit Sequence for context.

The transit sound is not designed — it is captured. The film should record production sound in real transit environments wherever possible. The authenticity of the transit soundscape is part of what makes the contrast with the house feel real.

Post-Sound Notes

Sound editor: To be determined
Re-recording mixer: To be determined
Mix format: Stereo 5.1 — the 5.1 mix should use surround channels very carefully; no sudden environmental sounds from the rears; the surround environment of the house should be the quietest, most centered mix in the film

Deliverables: Per distribution requirements — DCP mix, streaming stems

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