I’m watching this show Ghost Hunters for the first time - I don’t have cable, but I’m staying at a place that does, and the concept sounded interesting. Dudes are investigating a weird underground place and keep seeing weird stuff and hearing weird stuff.
While traveling down the hall, one of the guys yells, “DID YOU HEAR THAT?”
If a weird sound happened, the viewer would have no idea, because the ENTIRE show is underscored by a ceaseless music and sound effect bed that sounds like Trent Reznor and Al Jorgensen going on a drunken three-day weekend bender in the studio. It’s a constant patina of processed voices and yells, clanging sounds, electronic beats, synthesizer swooshes, atmospheric drones, sub-bass rumbles, etc. etc. etc. that is UNCEASING. If there were ANY supernatural sounds encountered by the investigators, they’d probably totally fit in with the lameoid sound desiger’s palette.
This seems to have happened to ALL horror movies over the past 10 years. I remember watching something recently - maybe it was The Abandoned? - where I had no idea whether the characters were reacting to sounds they were “hearing” or whether it just looked like they were because of the “horror” soundbed that ran the entire time.
A lot of TV shows are like this also. Many of them have a near constant bass hum in the background or a drumbeat.
Try watching “NCIS” sometime and you will see what I mean. Many times it is hard to understand the dialog over the background noise they pump into the scene. And it isn’t like the sounds are there to help build up tension in a scene - often it is just during normal conversation. I don’t watch the show, but I hear it all through the house when my buddy watches it. I call it the “drum and thump” show.
A lot of TV shows sounds like somebody left a mic next to a big electrical transformer and a drum-beat machine.
Yeah, it’s the completely arbitrary nature of the sounds that drives me nuts - I mean, the guys were just walking down a hallway and there was a cacophony of distorted yelling and crashing sounds on the soundtrack. What? Why!?
Joining as a complainant. Although some of these shows present what was heard more clearly later, the “weird” added background sounds are way too distracting.
They do that because the sounds aren’t really very scary or interesting or mysterious when you hear them by themselves. A pipe clanking without scary music is just a pipe clanking. Shows like Ghost Busters are (sometimes literally) built on nothing but smoke and mirrors. These guys are obviously never going to find a ghost so the producers have to create the illusion that they’re seeing and hearing things which are “spooky” or “unexplainable” (they are not). Obscuring any genuine recordings of ambient sound (if they ever even make any genuine recordings of ambient sound) with bullshit music and sound effects fools the rubes into thinking something interesting or “eerie” is going on when the reality is that nothing is going on and it never will.
Playing ordinary ambient noises underneath spooky music is the equivalent of an actor shaking a rubber alligator to make it look like it’s attacking him.
Another annoying thing about Ghost Hunters is the way they use that stupid fisheye lens when they are showing the area they’re going to be investigating. Is that supposed to make things look more mysterious?