Ambient horror: From sonic palimpsests to haptic sonority in the cinema of Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Abstract

Abstract In ‘Ambient horror: From sonic palimpsests to haptic sonority in the cinema of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’, Steven T. Brown explores how sound flows modulate affective states and noncognitive responses to the ambient horror films of J-horror maestro Kurosawa Kiyoshi. This article considers elements such as the interrelations between noise and silence, the function of ambient drones and sonic palimpsests, and uses advanced spectral and surround field techniques to analyse sound design. Considering these elements, along with the status of the acousmatic voice, we gain a better understanding of how soundscapes contribute to the construction of horror as a space for what Brown calls ‘haptic sonority’. Haptic sonority is a liminal space that blurs the boundaries between the sonic and the tactile, and compels the audience to bear witness to the embodied effects of sound waves vibrating bodies as if they were resonance chambers. In horror cinema, such haptic sonority opens an intensive space where one does not so much hear sounds as one feels them in one’s body in ways that are by turns bone-rattling, gut-wrenching, and hair-raising. It is here that film touches our bodies and invites us to enter into composition with the micropolitics of sound as resonant subjects in a ‘cinema of sensations’.