By Patrick Birk
Michael Myers is back in the new film Halloween Kills, directed by David Gordon Green, who also helmed the 2018 Halloween film. The latest addition to the Halloween film franchise, which began with director John Carpenter’s original scare-fest in 1978, once again stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode. Carpenter had a hand in this version as well, as he provided the score for Halloween Kills.
Rich Bologna in Studio A
Supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer/sound designer Rich Bologna and his team worked out of Warner Bros.’ Stage A in New York City. He was kind enough to talk to us about how he sonically designed Michael Myers to embody fer itself … and more.
In a horror film like Halloween Kills, how do you aim to create tension in both the sound design and in the mix?
Well, tension is kind of the modus operandi with horror films, right? It’s just a constant procession of tension or release. It’s a bit of a trope of horror films, but it’s very effective. Many times, we achieve the tension by not adding too much sound, and when the time is right, introducing the sound as a release. There is a good amount of that in this film, although I would say that Michael Myers’ presence is usually what drives our sound design and music — he’s the focal point of terror.
For instance, in the beginning of the film, there’s a scene with an epic house fire. The beginning of it is played pretty realistically until Michael is revealed when the fire-safe door opens. From that point on, the music and the sound design are really about following his action and letting him be our hero. It’s his show in the sense that he’s the driving force of the tension; we always have to be mindful of letting him inform how we’re letting that play out.
The fun challenge for us is that Michael Myers doesn’t speak; he just breathes, walks and slashes. So with those three ingredients, the challenge is making that interesting and compelling and terrifying. That was the fun we had, knowing those were the parameters of what we had to work with … and making those sounds as scary, punchy and well-designed as we could.
And the music?
I feel like the music was a guiding light for us. John Carpenter did this score, which was an honor. He’s a hero to so many of us, and he did such a cool job. It amazes me how fresh his stuff still is and how he always strives to be on the cutting edge of technology and doesn’t repeat himself. He gave us so many cool stems and that in many ways served as a sound design ingredient. They were really cool textures, and we did a lot of fun Dolby Atmos work with those stems. His stuff was instrumental in building the overall palette of the film.
Rich Bologna
The score was definitely rooted in ‘80s sounds, but there was a modern edge to it. What was Carpenter’s process like?
I think John Carpenter has a distinct sound, and that’s probably what you’re hearing in that regard. He does work with his son, . I know his collaborators spent a lot of time sussing out cool, new synths, and I think he’s a big fan of soft synths. I’m not sure of the specific gear that he was leaning on, but I know that it’s pretty cutting-edge. In terms of what sounds he chooses, they’re classic but they’re also quite modern. In many ways, I think that was our watermark for the whole sound of the film.
What were your favorite signature sounds you created for Michael? You’d mentioned his breathing, footsteps and slashing.
Foley was a really big deal in this film, and since we had those three ingredients to play with, we wanted them to be as big and bad as possible. Even with a simple thing like his footsteps, we had three or four layers of sounds forming them. In most films, it’s just a footstep and you’d maybe add a little reverb and that’s that, but with Michael’s character, we had that realistic layer of just a heavy boot sound. But we also had almost creature-esque, low-end elements to the sound. I joked that this was probably one of the few movies where I’ll ever add footsteps to the subwoofers. So we’re actually hitting that when we have close-up shots of his feet or him coming in for the kill.
P.K. Hooker, who co-supervised this job in LA, came up with a great breathing through the mask sound when he worked on the 2018 Halloween with David Gordon Green. We ended up carrying that sound into this film because it became an iconic thing. That’s just one of those sounds that I think makes people’s skin crawl — when you have a tight shot on that mask and hear that breathing. Then in terms of the blade sounds, that’s where we can be artful. Again, it was a matter of getting the realistic layer in place, which the Foley team did a great job on. Andy Malcolm’s crew in Canada, called Footsteps, did the Foley for Halloween Kills.
They gave us a great layer of more realistic Foleys, but also added some more stylistic sounds to their tracks. Anytime there was a blade, we would have that layer and then add embellishments or sweeteners to make them cool and “shingy” when they needed to be.
There is a language for horror films that I think people are expecting, and we have to honor that, especially since this is a very popular franchise that people love and have been dedicated to for a long time. The challenge for us is to take that language and build upon it and make it our own thing, and the way we achieve that is making sure the knife sounds are fresh and never phoned in.
In most films, our job is not to be seen. In these types of films, our job is very much to be seen and to actually help the audience through the action and be part of … the effectiveness of the horror. It rests on our shoulders to a degree. And it’s really fun, especially since director David Gordon Green is such a fan of sound and very seasoned and trusting of what we can do. He just let us run wild with what we wanted to try, and a lot of it made it in. If he had opinions, he would chime in and lead us in a different direction, but it was really fun to just be unharnessed and wild.
What is your technique for quickly and efficiently stacking layered effects, like the ones you created for Michael?
With Foley, and this isn’t Halloween-specific, I spend a lot of time looking at very zoomed-in waveforms and making sure that they’re lined up and not flamming. It’s time-consuming, but I think it also pays off because it is such a big part of the film, and It’s not that hard to line up waveforms.
Also, with stuff like that, sometimes you can affect the phase and it can lessen the “punchiness” of those effects. Ultimately, if you have it arrayed in such a way that the sounds are characteristically different from each other, you’re not going to have to worry too much about the phase because each sound is building upon itself and part of a whole. The low end is always very effective for punch, too. Also, objectively for the audience, it’s something that is felt and not heard, in a way. So this is a great film to see in the theater because I think a lot of the sound design is very visceral for the audience … to just feel those effects and not necessarily be aware that we’re doing it.
What scene did you most enjoy designing?
There are scenes in this movie where I feel the sound design is really shining. For instance, one of my favorite kills is the scene with the older couple, Sondra and Phil, who are playing with the drone. That scene was such a blast for sound because even though there is score in that scene, it’s much more about the sound design.
Then there’s the initial kill with Phil; it’s big and bad and there’s his head crunching against a wall with big, disgusting cracking sounds and things of that sort. But once that’s over, it just becomes this trippy, surreal thing where Sondra gets impaled with that fluorescent light tube, which was its own sound. We had a lot of fun with that. There’s just the larynx sound to it, which is the bone crushing in her throat, and the glass sound. Then we also added a blood draining through the tube sound. After that, she bleeds out and she watches her husband get stabbed on the kitchen table, but there’s this very trippy television thing coming off screen that pans around. There’s this “droney” environment that we created that I think probably a lot of people would’ve thought was music, but that’s mostly sound design.
The Big John, Little John scene was spatially interesting. How did you engineer that scene? To what extent was it following the floor plan of Michael’s childhood home?
That house is a recurring setting in this film, and it was crucial to get the geography right, especially during the Big John Little John scene. That scene was also kind of a misdirect — part of the fun is where do you want the audience’s ears and eyes to go? The knocks and where they’re coming from and what they’re reacting to, and the fact that the house is two stories. We ended up doing a lot of Atmos panning, putting stuff up in the ceiling when we’re trying to sell that kind of thing.
That’s also a good example of how it’s effective to suck out the sound of a scene, where it’s just crickets and the television and then the knocks and are much louder than you would probably ever hear otherwise. It was a really good show piece for panning and reverb and for putting the audience where we wanted them to be. Even when we come back to that house with Allyson and her boyfriend Cameron — that scene was super fun to mess with the panning and because he’s upstairs, she’s downstairs, and there’s the dead father in the attic.
What were your go-to reverbs, compressors, EQs and effects for this project? On the effects end, what was the most fun for you to use?
I purposely keep my templates pretty simple. I do this because when I move around from studio to studio, I want to make sure that things load correctly and they’re not having to reinvent the wheel just to get my Pro Tools sessions running. But I’m a big fan of reverb, I love Altiverb, and I use that primarily. I also use ReVibe for my exterior slaps and Pro compressor and Limiter for buses. On a movie like this, they come in handy because things tend to get pretty loud. Then I use Avid’s Pro Subharmonic synthesizer for before effects hit the sub. Then on each track, there’s an EQ and there’s a channel strip, so if I need a compressor, I have it there, but I tend not to compress too much. Warner Bros. New York has a sort of a no-compression rule, as much as possible. This way everything sounds as big as it can.
Rich Bologna
I do a fair amount of stuff offline that isn’t in the main session. So I use some fun plugins there. I’m a big fan of the Native Instruments Reaktor stuff, so I do some things in there. I almost use it as a tape machine, in a way, where I have some modules that I really like, and I go back to again and again. I improvise stuff and then roll tape and then record performances. Then I’ll go back and cut it up. Usually, if I get five minutes of recording in a reactor patch, I’ll use maybe a minute of that piece of audio, if I’m lucky. I really like how that plug-in sounds. It’s just got cool reverbs and a nice characteristic sound to it.
I also use Soundtoys; they do really cool stuff with their EchoBoy and Crystallizer, but I don’t keep those in the session. If I’m working with those things, I’ll record those tracks down before I bring it into the full session.
My co-mixer, Paul Urmson, is great to work with because he’s usually an effects mixer himself, so he did a ton of fun stuff with the music, giving it the detail like an effects mixer would give effects tracks. He did a ton of really cool panning, and they ended up doing a really funny thing with certain pieces of dialogue. David will have these zany ideas. For example, he wanted one of the police officers in a flashbacks to have a phaser on his voice and to be pitched down a little bit. Paul brought out this thing from IRCAM, the French company, and did some crazy effects with the dialogue. I think the theme there is that we were pretty unrestrained, and had fun where we wanted to with just weird, crazy sounds that we wouldn’t normally be able to put into final mixes.
Patrick Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City. He releases original material under the moniker Carmine Vates. Check out his recently released single, Virginia.
