One of the things that makes thunderstorms scary is the suspense of waiting for the thunder clap after you see the lightning. But I can’t ever recall seeing it portrayed properly on the silver screen.
I was watching an X-Files rerun yesterday and it kept bugging me how the thunder crash was made to happen at exactly the same time as the lightning flash. No, no, no, NO that’s not right. Unless they are trying to get me to believe that multiple lightning strikes are all touching-down less than a few hundred feet away. It would have been much more effective and added additional suspence if they had applied the appropriate delay.
This is not hard to do. Thunderstorms are the simplest of special effects, so all they have to do is tell the guy shaking the cookie sheet to wait a second or two after the other guy jiggles the light switch, and voila! A realistic thunderstorm.
But no, they won’t do it that way. Even though almost everybody has experienced real live thunder and lightning, and therefore should be able to spot fake thunder & lightning.
There’s a great scene in** Poltergeist** where they do this. The son is laying in bed at night scared of the storm outside and he starts to count the seconds from when he sees the lightning to hearing the thunder, and as each one gets shorter the suspense just grows more and more. (The way that scene ended scared the crap out of me when I was little.)
It may be suspenseful when you’re in it, but it’s not particularly dramatic when setting mood. After all, usually the lightning/thunder effect is not there for its own sake, but to enhance the feeling of something else even more suspenseful/scary/threatening. Having the lightning flash and then the thunder roll seconds afterwards may be “real”, but it’s also anti-climactic, especially when the lightning/thunder is being used as part of a big “reveal” (the monster/killer/intruder, etc.). After all, you can’t hear explosions or witness fireballs in the vacuum of space, but it’s a convention that’s become synonymous with a certain science-defying shorthand.
I think I remember Poltergeist getting it right, but that’s because the temporal distance was used as a scary effect on its own (the kid counting, with each subsequent countdown getting shorter and shorter).
Because there are storms like the ones they show on TV. You really haven’t heard thunder as lightning flashes, without a delay? I’ve been in lots of storms where there is no appreciable delay. But don’t take my word for it, the Astrosociety claims that they can be simultaneous too. It just means that the storm is directly overhead, which seems to be the case on TV and in movies. It certainly was in the X-Files episode mentioned because DP was creating the lightning himself.
OTOH, we almost never get bolts of lightning like you always see on TV, just sheet lightning.
No I don’t think I have. When I went to lunch this afternoon, there was a pile driver on the other side of the street - it was about a block away. And even at that minimal distance there was a very obvious delay between the time the driver struck the pile and when you heard the BANG. Even if a storm was directly overhead, I’m sure it would be more than a couple hundred feet off the ground.
Well I have to disagree. I kept imagining how much more suspensful that episode would have been if they had added the delay for the thunder. And that’s beside the point anyway, why not just do it right? It doesn’t take any more effort than doing it wrong.
Ah, the “attack all of the viewer’s senses simultaneously” approach. It is cliché and must be stopped. Monster bursts through the door - queue lightning, thunder and three-chord crescendo. Bah.
And that’s exactly what they did in that X-Files episode. It was “the Great Mutado” or something like that - filmed in black & white about deformed man with two faces merged together lurching around like Frankenstein’s monster while Mulder and Scully try to keep away the pitchfork-armed villagers.
I’ll point out what some of you surely already know: thunderstorms are pretty rare in California. I spent my first 22 years there and I think I experienced only maybe three or four t-storms the entire time, and they were all pretty short and wimpy. Experiencing a Midwestern t-storm for the first time was like a revelation for me. (An awesome revelation, nothing like a good storm! The best sort is one of those thunder and lightning snowstorms. Kickass.)
