By Patrick Birk

Based on Steven King’s 2018 novel of the same name, HBO’s The Outsider spins a chilling tale that begins when a model citizen from a small town in Georgia (played by Jason Bateman, an executive producer on the series) is accused of murdering a child. Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) digs deeper into the case with the help of a savant PI named Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo).

Mandell Winter – Credit: Sumiko Braun

Mandell Winter, who worked as the supervising sound editor on the project out of Sony Pictures Studios, was kind enough to speak with me about how he and his team created a soundtrack that sold the series’ many chilling moments. Winter’s other recent credits include Apple TV+’s Defending Jacob and Quibi’s #Freerayshawn. Last year he earned two Emmy noms for his work on Deadwood: The Movie and HBO’s True Detective.

The series is laden with tension. It’s lots of suspense punctuated by these unsettling moments. Did you develop a method for developing the suspense and horror throughout the show? If there was a method to the madness, how did you achieve it without it going stale?
Picture editors Tad Dennis, Leo Trombetta, Dorian Harris and Daniel James Scott developed the pacing through the cut, and then it was our job to interpret that. We developed a sonic language and let it evolve throughout the course of the show. We didn’t want to stay on one idea too long.

An example of this would be the scene where Fred Peterson attempts suicide. Originally, we had taken that scene and punctuated certain movements in tying the knot in the sheet or stepping on the bed. When we finally got to the mix stage and played everything, we started pulling stuff out. It became more powerful just letting the clock tick, then coming in with impact of the window breaking that brings us back into the real world.

There are points where I felt like it was very much stripped back to the bare essentials.
The nature of the show lent itself to that. We had very internal moments with our characters that allowed us to strip everything back and then come in with bold statements. It allowed for a dynamic mix.

Those dynamics play well at that moment when Jack fires a single pistol round in the middle of the woods. Just the space around that was huge to me.
Yeah, going from the quiet and the solitude of being in the forest and then having something as jarring as a gunshot goes a long way. Even though it may not be the loudest point in the show, it appears louder because it’s surrounded by silence. So we’re playing with the psychoacoustics as well.

Much of the design is a kind of stylized realism. What were some of your favorite hyper-real elements to work on when the show takes a surreal turn?
I’m particularly fond of the last episode because it gave each character his or her moment. The edit was stylized, and we went from big action to slo mo and focused on the tiniest detail — like when we’d cut between the caves where we’d hear El Cuco, and we’d cut back out to the shootout.

There were moments for everything, and it wasn’t like dialogue was competing with sound effects. Everything had its moment, and it became this beautiful dance that allowed us to pull everything back and then hit with these dynamic punches to create a wonderful mix and a wonderful-sounding show.

(While the sound crew was from Sony Pictures, they mixed at Deluxe on Stage 5 in Hollywood on the Avid S6 Console in 5.1.)

There’s a moment where Holly Gibney is alone in the dark and lets out a massive scream. How did you process that?
That was an interesting moment because the scream from production was not as long as the shot held. Cynthia Erivo put so much energy into it that she ran out of air. So we had to stretch the sound, and it was difficult to do without artifacting and having it become totally unusable since it’s a throaty scream. It’s not just a single tone that we could stretch; it had movement to it. But we found a couple different tools that helped us.

We started with Serato Pitch ‘n Time, and I think we ended up with an old plugin, Paulstretch, that allows you to stretch really, really long.

As a sound designer, would you appreciate if the recording standard moved to 96KHz?
I’d be open to it. It gives us more room for processing if we need to, especially in denoising. It could be helpful for time-stretching, as well.

How did you approach the voice of El Cuco?
The voice of El Cuco evolved over time because it goes from host to host — different actors as El Cuco. We passed different versions back and forth with Jason Bateman, trying to figure out what the exact right amount of manipulation was. We layered production, and then during stages between the hosts, we added more of an animalistic element to it and created that kind of growly sound that El Cuco has prior to becoming Claude later on.

I was specifically thinking of Claude in the cave scene at the end. What were you using for the delays and the reverbs there?
I believe we used The Cargo Cult’s Slapper quite a bit. I’m really proud of the caves and how that turned out because they filmed in actual caves. The production recordings had some problems that presented our dialogue editor, Micah Loken, with a real challenge. But once he cleaned that up, we were able to apply the reverb and the delay to make it universal, so everything felt like it was moving throughout the space.

Was that the case even in the flashback to the ‘40s, when they searched the cave for the Walker boys? Having a group of men running through a cave with jangling lanterns seems very difficult to deal with.
We ADR’d a little added bit here and there, but it was mostly production that we were able to clean up. We also added Foley to sweeten everything in there.

You mentioned that the picture editors set the tone of the show. I noticed a cut that coincides with a transient, when officer Tamika Collins’ crutch hit the station floor super-hard. Were you in contact with the picture department during the editing process?
I’ll go in for a spotting session early sometimes, before they turn it over to me, or I may get several versions of a cut. It’s not one of those shows where you get it locked and you just go forward; it’s evolving. So I may get three or four versions of an episode before we’re done. But in that particular instance, that was always there, and we were just like, “Okay, we need a loud sound there to punctuate the cut.” It’s reading what’s in front of you and interpreting how to present it.

What was the collaboration like with Jason Bateman and the rest of the creative team?
We work closely with the creative team. I’m in frequent contact with co-producer Lori Slomka and the editors. We reached out to Jason and got notes from him to discuss concepts and ideas, particularly in coming up with the voice of El Cuco. We’d pass ideas back and forth and then get him to sign off on stuff to make sure that we were interpreting his vision.

I think my biggest takeaway from early meetings was that we didn’t want to follow the traditional tropes of the genre. We wanted to play more in the psychological and less in the big jump scares. It really is in the ominous and almost insidious nature of this creature that you simply don’t know — and as the characters figure it out, so does the audience.

A major theme of the show was grief. Obviously, El Cuco feeds on it.
It’s interesting because this year I have worked on a handful of shows that deal with grief, like Defending Jacob.

We had the concept of grief in mind as we worked on The Outsider, and my team and I discussed, “What does grief sound like, and how do you play that?” We’ve found that by letting the actor remain in the environment and slowly peeling it back, silence became much more powerful, rather than just putting in sounds for sound’s sake.

The design and the score were tightly woven in and out of one another throughout the show. Did you collaborate with the music department from the beginning?
We worked closely with our music editor, Michael Brake, but the composers, Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, did a phenomenal job — their music was so haunting. When we were editing, we only had temp music, so we weren’t exactly sure what was coming to us.

Once we heard the themes on the first episode, we kind of knew what to expect, so we worked on the design in layers. The mindset was, “We want highs, mids, lows and maybe some sub stuff in there.” That way, we could peel layers back as needed so it wouldn’t compete with the music and would be complementary. We’d say, “Hey, this low-end stuff is competing. It’s getting muddy. Let’s turn that off and go with just this mid-rangy supporting piece or this high-end tension that’s not in the music.”

Having done that preparation, we brought it to the stage and worked with mixers Tateum Kohut and Greg Orloff. They blended everything so tightly that you didn’t know where one element was handing off to the other at times; it was really beautiful.

I’d also like to highlight my crew. Without them, there’s nothing. They’re a huge part of this show. Also, I’d be lost without my assistant, Eryne Prine. They all deserve the shout-outs.

Did you incorporate any techniques you developed on past procedurals, such as True Detective?
Projects build on each other, so it’s an accumulated knowledge base. I’ll learn something from one show, and I may apply a technique later to another show, whether it be the next project or four or five down the line. As you go along, you learn different ways to tell stories with sound. I’m a constant student now, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t and how we can grow.

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