Summary: Sound is an essential ingredient to any scary movie or scary TV show. Yesterday, Kristen Meinzer and Rafer Guzman from The Takeaway’s Movie Date podcast offered up some classic soundtracks from The Omen, The Exorcist and others. But sound effects are just as essential as music, and the process of creating the overall sound design on a project is one of Hollywood's great under-appreciated arts. Gary Megregian, supervising sound editor on the FX series American Horror Story: Coven, joins Soundcheck to discuss the importance of sound design. Plus: He picks apart one horrifyingly sound-rich scene from Coven, layer by layer. Interview Highlights Gary Megregian, on trying to stay true to the sounds of the past while filming in the modern day: There’s so much noise that goes on in the world. You’re out and you hear airplanes and you hear cars. All that stuff is still kind of going on in the filming process [on the set] of the 1830s. Trying to clean that stuff out, and giving it the backgrounds that are ideal for the 1830s, and to trying to be authentic as possible — that’s a challenge. On sound designer Ben Burtt, who worked on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films: Everyone I know who has gotten into this line of work has been influenced by him in some way. But there’s also Randy Thom and Gary Rydstrom — amazing sound designers. They’re not just about finding the cool sounds and making the cool sounds. They do that, but it’s all about telling the story. And they do an amazing job of finding the best way to do that through sound. On being blown away by the sound design in No Country For Old Men: That sound is so natural. It’s the first movie I’ve seen in a long time where I was on the edge of my seat, and it was all based on sound. Because there isn’t a ton of music in that movie. It’s just playing to the viewer. It’s putting that viewer in the scene…. That movie’s just a beautiful film, in sound.
