Films › Sound and score
Eraserhead
Directed by David Lynch, 1977
Lynch and Alan Splet spent a year on the sound alone, building an unbroken industrial drone that never lets the audience rest. There is effectively no silence in the film, and that continuous bed is what produces the dread. Sound sources are frequently unidentifiable, which prevents the viewer from resolving the environment. The radiator sequences show music, image and design designed as one object. Splet and Lynch built much of the soundtrack from recordings of machinery, animal noises and processed household sounds rather than conventional foley, then layered and pitch-shifted them until the origin was untraceable, a method that essentially treats sound design as composition from the ground up. Because the drone rarely resolves or resolves only briefly during the radiator interludes, the audience has no acoustic safe point in the entire runtime, a deliberately punishing structure that low-budget horror and experimental filmmakers still study for how much dread can be produced without a single music cue.
What to watch for
Watch, or rather listen to, the constant background bed and note when it changes pitch.
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