Silence can begin to feel oppressive in a horror movie. Think of a hand inching towards a closed door, or a secluded alleyway that goes suspiciously quiet. In the silence, there is anticipation, and a longing for a burst of sound to puncture the tension.
Some of 2024’s most inventive horror films understand this, thriving on quiet, withholding instead of introducing sound. Noise, in these movies, instead begins to feel invasive and intrusive, an unwanted presence that we reflexively bristle at. In Chime, a cooking instructor is slowly driven insane by the sound of a chime that only he can hear, but the audience is never privy to this noise. Instead, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa fills the film with the natural sounds of the cityscape, laying the groundwork for the madness lurking under the mundanity of everyday life. In A Violent Nature, a slasher described as an “ambient horror” film, contains no score. Instead, the forest in which it’s set lends itself to a terrifying sonic contrast between the rhythmic calm of the murderer’s footsteps and the panicked unsteadiness of his victims as they stagger away. And in Azrael, set in a post-Rapture world, speech is considered to be a sin among cultists. Their scarred throats, from which only guttural noises emanate, reveal just what they’ve had to sacrifice.
