Berberian Sound Studio

Looking at the importance of incidental music and Foley sound effects in the horror movie genre.

Berberian Sound Studio takes the horror of labor as its narrative center, albeit through the lens a Foley artist who takes a job in an Eastern European studio to do the post-production sound design for a slasher movie.

This darkly imagined and expressionistically shot feature takes up the mantle of cult films that use the labor of a sound recordist—notably Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (shown at On Screen/Sound: No. 7) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation—as a plot device to entwine Foley sounds with the sounds of real murder.

PROGRAM

• Berberian Sound Studio (2012) Peter Strickland / Music: Will Slater
• Approximate runtime: 110 minutes