By Patrick Birk

While Halloween might be over, our collective love of scary films lives on. Last month, Hulu delivered Books of Blood, a creepy horror anthology based on Clive Barker’s 1984 book series of the same name. Directed by Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Enterprise, Terra Nova, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey), who co-wrote with Adam Simon, the film weaves together three stories, which at first seem to function as independent episodes before being tied together in the final chapter.

Greg King

Books of Blood jumps between sets of characters, played by Britt Robertson (Jenna), Freda Foh Shen (Ellie), Anna Friel (Mary), Rafi Gavron (Simon) and Yul Vazquez (Bennett). Robertson’s Jenna has a neurological disorder called misophonia, which is when certain sounds trigger rage or panic. The disorder plays a big role in the film.

LA’s King Soundworks provided the audio post, largely during the pandemic. I recently caught up with re-recording mixer Greg King and sound designer Jon Greasley to find out about their process. The last time I spoke to the duo was to discuss their work on the series Cosmos: Possible Worlds, for which they provided the sound design and mix. Let’s find out more about their work on Books of Blood …

There are cockroaches in this film. Did the experience you acquired from working with bugs on Cosmos factor into your design here?
Greg King: It’s really interesting because the director of this film, Brannon Braga, was also the showrunner and the head writer on Cosmos.

Jon Greasley

Jon Greasley: The cockroaches were obviously a pivotal part of the sound design. We went through a lot of revisions and experimentation with them. There was also a lot sending clips to Brannon to make sure it was heading in the direction that he wanted.

You have to find the right balance of creepy and gross and then the right balance of subtlety. How much do we want to hear it? Do we want to not really know what we’ve heard but just know that we heard something? It was really in-depth, but in terms of lessons we learned from Cosmos, I think this is a lot more subjective of a viewing experience. We tried to approach it — especially Jenna’s storyline — as though we were experiencing it completely from her point of view.

We were a lot less concerned with what was accurate and representative of the real world and just far more focused on evoking a visceral and emotional reaction. Cosmos featured real recordings of bees. Last time, Greg was detailing all the various ways that you can record bees, and we were talking about how we could treat them in the sonic space and get one bee versus a whole bunch of bees.

For Books of Blood, it was me with a microphone scratching my fingernails on a piece of plywood, and then me scratching it from the other side so it sounds like the scratching is coming from behind the wall. Then I tried that scratching with all sorts of things: my fingernails, actual metal nails, screws and other things to get that right amount of “scritch scratch.” I believe there are almost no real cockroaches on the soundtrack.

Jenna’s misophonia was a huge plot point. Brannon Braga has a similar condition. Did that inform your sound design?
King: Yes. It was good insight for us. He had it a lot worse as a child, and he says it does not go away. You have to control it. So now, as an adult, he’s got to kind of repress it consciously, or it will take over. It was interesting because the poor guy was sitting in the room with us while we were specifically trying to trigger that impulse. We were able to get it to a place where, at an emotional level, he was able to say, “Yeah, this is how it affects you, and this is how it sounds in your brain.”

Greasley: Some people are triggered by different sorts of sounds, and Brannon was saying the most common one is a chewing, eating, lip-smacking sound. I think that annoys a lot of people, so it’s possible a large portion of the population has a minor case of misophonia. I guess if you have a really bad case, it could be a wide range of sounds or just sound in general, which is how we approached it with Jenna’s character.

What were your techniques for developing misophonia from Jenna’s perspective?
Greasley: The way we like to record sound effects and Foley is to capture the sound of the room. There’s no sense putting the microphone two inches away from something because that’s not how anybody hears anything. You want to hear a door close in a space. You want to hear a car drive down a street and bounce off surfaces. You want to hear the Foley as though the footsteps are 6, 10 or 12 feet away from you, not  inches away. That’s not what things sound like in the real world.

But for all of the sounds that trigger Jenna, we took the exact opposite approach and really close-miked mouth sounds, potato chip crunches, clattering and banging of plates and dishes … whatever it was, it was just as dry and brittle-sounding as possible. Then, because all of the rest of our tastes are quite naturalistic and roomy-sounding, it’s easy to create that juxtaposition between the two sonic worlds — because they’re so starkly different from each other.

King: We retreat on other sounds too. So there were atmospheres or other sounds in the background. Crowds, for example, and we’d pull those back. Or music. We would retreat on that to help focus on those sounds and make them as isolated as we could, as if they were bouncing around inside her head.

How did you achieve the sound of Jenna’s noise-cancelling headphones?
Greasley: Tried a bunch of different ways, but we ended up building a sound for that kind of pressurized-headphone feel. I mean, if you’ve ever worn those headphones, they sort of feel like they’re pumping in a very slight white noise. They’re mostly over-the-ear headphones, so they feel really isolated. It kind of feels like you’re locked in a bubble, which is the desired effect for Jenna — being in her own sound cocoon.

In reality, noise-cancelling headphones use built-in microphones to phase-cancel the sound around you, so you end up with not much low end in any of the sounds that do sneak through. We went the opposite way with the treatment of the surrounding sounds because it was easier to sell the idea if you’ve got this low, muffled, rumbling sound.

Because this is a horror movie, the low end can help us with a sense of dread and impending doom. We didn’t want to sacrifice the low end when trying to build tension and a sense of fear. We did a lot of really extreme filtering, but we always tried to leave in the sounds around her that she is trying to escape … just have them be really rolled off and pushed back. So, there’s always a sense that even though she’s retreating from those things, they are all still there, and they all could potentially set her off again.

Another thing that really helped us in that regard was Brannon. He was open to having a lot of those sequences play without music, and this helped us sell the headphones concept, because if the score starts every time she puts the headphones on, it almost feels like she’s just listening to music. She even makes a point of saying that’s not what they’re for. So we experimented a few different ways, and Brannon really felt — and we obviously agreed — that the way to go for those sequences was to have them be 100% sound design and really just try to experience it from her perspective rather than as a viewer.

How did you create transitions from the chaotic sonic world of Jenna’s misophonia to the relief of the noise-cancelling headphones?
Greasley: We were matching really steep 24dB per-octave filters. Then Greg and I would filter out all the sounds that were annoying, and we would also filter out whatever music might be playing or whatever dialogue production track was playing. It was like both of us trying to do the same sweep at the same time as it rolls by to make sure that it sounds smooth across all of the elements.

How closely did you work with the composer? It seems like the score and sound design intermingle a lot, especially in stings.
King: It’s hard to say. It might be 50-50, or it might even be more on the effects end. It depends. I mean, one thing Brannon really likes to do is experiment with music. He’s very willing to say, “Let’s try this without music,” or “Let’s bring the music in a little later,” or “Let’s take the music out a little earlier.” He’s very conscious of that. Very much like he was on Cosmos. And lots of times, even though the composers [Joel J. Richard and Tyler Bates] may have done a fantastic musical sting, Brannon wouldn’t want it. Maybe because it might’ve been a misophonia moment or some other horror point. He didn’t want it to sound musical; he’d want us to do sound design, so lots of times, we’d be whipping things up on the stage.

It’s a complete combo of music and effects. It’s not always necessarily an and/or situation. Because Brannon’s actually quite enthusiastic about experimenting with that kind of stuff, we took that approach on every single sting. I’ve got the music on my side of the desk, and Jon’s got the sound design on his side of the desk. There might be a situation where I say, “Okay, I’m going to get rid of some of the brass and the strings, but I really liked this percussion element.” Then the composers got this bizarro musical kind of stinger sound, and Jon might say, “I’ve got this.” So there was no rule on it, per se.

There were no rules for the stings, but did you find yourselves working with rules or guidelines on the film in general?
King: Since a lot of this was happening in Jenna’s head, we didn’t have to root ourselves in reality. For instance, sometimes the cockroaches were real and sometimes the cockroaches were — to steal an old Alfred Hitchcock term — a MacGuffin.

As a late 2020 release, did you post Books of Blood during quarantine?
Greasley: We had just started doing the editorial prep when everything got shut down and the production put the whole thing on pause. There was a little bit of a lag, and when we finally did come back on, everything was totally locked down, so we had a little bit of time to plan out how we might adjust things differently.

I frequently do prep work at my own home studio, so it wasn’t that big of a shift for sound design stuff. But then once we started having to bring people in for things, that was a big shift.

King Soundworks

King: We were originally supposed to mix this in March and then when COVID hit, they just went into freeze mode for six to eight weeks. Fortunately, Jon and I spent a lot of time sitting 6 feet apart from each other at a console. We sort of felt confident because we’re around each other every day, but we were still wearing masks. But as far as allowing clients into the studio, we had to be really careful about that. Even though the mix stage is pretty large, we only allowed two people in there — the director and the picture editor. This allowed us to be six feet apart from one another.

The biggest challenge was the actors. They filmed this film in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and we had a combination of LA-based actors starring in it along with actors who were based in Vancouver and Toronto. There were a couple of day-player actors who were in Halifax or Eastern Canada.

We had to do ADR but couldn’t get them into the studio because it was the early days of COVID, when everybody was really freaked out and nobody had clear information on how contagious it was. Luckily, a former colleague of ours, Rob Nokes, now owns the Todd-AO, developed an app called Actors Mobile ADR, which records ADR on the iPads.

Greasley: We did have to do some prep on our end — our guys would split the clips up and put in the timecodes where the cues are, but the app itself does visual streamers and pops. It mutes the audio that you’re going to be replacing when it’s recording, but not when it’s playing back. It’s all kind of set up like a tiny on-the-iPad ADR studio.

King: We were able to basically FedEx them an iPad with a lightning microphone and the software. They were able to do their dialogue replacement, and it would automatically upload to the cloud.

Where did you have the actors record themselves in their homes?
Greasley: In closets. The golden rule is no kitchens or bathrooms!

Patrick Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City.