Right now in English we're doing the film studies unit (favorite unit by far, we straight up just watch movies in class). After we watch a movie, we have a short discussion about it. Usually they aren't that extensive because it's the morning and we would much rather be sleeping, but today we discussed the movie Alien (which we had to watch at home on our own time for very obvious reasons). One big portion of the discussion and analysis of the movie was the effect of music and sound.
For those of you who don't know, a) come out from under your rock it's 2016, b) it's about a crew in space who encounters an alien and (spoiler alert) they all get killed except for one.
Back to the point of this post: music and sound play a crucial part in creating the atmosphere and feeling of horror. Not just in Alien, music sets up many scenes and what is going to happen in them. If you watch a horror movie, or any movie really, without sound or with out music, you're basically just watching people walk around.
Movie scores are such an important aspect of film. Sometimes it feels like people hardly talk about the scores of new movies, but rather how many bad guys got killed or how big the explosion is. But what would Star Wars be without John WIlliams? A well done score can make or break the show. Many action movies nowadays just bombard the audience with noise and flashing footage and you walk out of the theater with a headache. But music can be used to convey emotion, establish character, and add to the tension of the conflict and the relief of the resolution... I’m not entirely sure what I was going for here other than emphatic agreement.
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