Tic Tac: How They Met “Stranger Things” in Season 4 of Haunting Sound

[This story contains major spoilers from the fourth season of Stranger Things, Volume 1.]

The Weird stuff Audiences still have the sound of season four in their ears. In the first part of the final season of the hit Netflix series, after Hawking’s teens were teased, grandpa’s bell now haunts viewers.

Eagle ears can tell they’ve heard the clock tick before when it comes to this. Weird stuff criminals. The shocking voice associated with season four’s upside-down villain Vekna known as “One” (Jamie Campbell Bower) at the end of Finale 1 was first heard in season two’s “Chapter Four: Will Wise”. Along with Hopper (David Harbour), he discovered the tunnel upside down, and again in the season three episode, “Chapter Two: Mall Rats”, when Billy (played by Montgomery) was played by the Mind Player.

I was Weird stuff Does it indicate Vekna’s imminent arrival? Not so fast.

Not even Craig Hanihan, the sound effects editor for the first season of the Emmy-nominated show who led the team to create the soundtrack for Vecna, didn’t realize that he had already created the soundtrack for Gong that would have such a reverberating effect on Wednesday. season.

“I really used the call and didn’t know until I thought about it,” said Henigan, a re-recording mixing supervisor and sound editor. hollywood reporter. “I still remember Sean [Levy, executive producer and director] I listen and say, “Is this the watch? Why do we have a clock there? But Matt and Ross [Duffer, creators] I liked it a lot and we left. At the time, I didn’t know that the clock we had in Season 4 would be such a scenario.”

The end of the clock plays an important role as it signals the arrival of Vekna and time is running out. The upright monster, revealed to be the first child of a telekinetically powered patient in Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modain) Hawkins, of which he later became a part of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), becomes a floating spectator, psychological demon. . Reunite in season four after boy eleven defeats him and banishes him to the secret world of Hawkins, where he will continue to refine his powers for years to come. When he reappears in season four, he does so by penetrating the minds of his victims and tapping into their trauma. His victims know they are being hunted when the grandfather clock and its hideous bell appear in hallucinations.

As a creative starting point each year, the Duffer brothers give Henigan adjectives to describe the season. If the third season was “Gori”, then the fourth season is “psychological”. Of those early conversations, Hanihan says he and his voice group took the recorder and ran off with it.

“The sound of this season is almost a test stone for what we as humans are really excited and crazy about. “Often it’s not the big, aggressive, horrible horror sounds, it’s the simplicity of the watch and the psychological thing that comes to mind and plays with your memories,” he said of his mission on the team last season. , which came out in two parts, and the final two episodes that make up the 2nd volume will ship on July 1.

“All these ideas came from the realistic nature of sounds, but we turned them into a world. Weird stuff. You Weird“Think about it: what makes you feel part of our world?” he says. “Because we’ve done so many seasons now, there’s a fantastic upside-down signature palette. Now we can add Clock and Vecna ​​to this list.

Hennigan initially put the most pressure on creating Vekna’s voice. “I want to put this in the historical context of the bad guys,” he said of Bower, a monster who lives among the film’s royal family.

Bower spent hours creating the right sound, which the sound team took responsibility for editing. “He’s going to disrupt the speakers in a way that will make everyone think: I know this bad guy. He will be relentless and he will be in my brain every time he speaks or is around. ”

The sound designer says that thanks to Bauer’s natural tone and frequency, he was able to quickly create the right processing chain to make Vecna’s sound both dangerous and understandable. “If you don’t understand, it doesn’t matter how the processing works,” he says. “He is not supernatural; It’s not very deep and growing. You just made me process a really radical sound. [voice effect] It’s great.”

And while Henigan knew that the ticking of the clock that accompanied it would play an important role in Vekna’s legacy and teachings, he was surprised by her passionate reaction. Weird stuff The ratings that helped the show earn two record-breaking weekends on Netflix and gave Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” an ever-increasing stream of life.

“There are youtubers who made a video of one or two hours with a photo of one of the episodes. You can sleep now, he thinks. “And someone created a ringtone.”

In the first episode, which begins with Sacrifice Number 1, Chris (Grace Van Dien) eventually takes new preschooler Eddie (Joseph Quinn) to Lama, which the viewer takes to be the standard grandfather clock. To build the clock’s sound, Henigan began recording the classic Westminster clock. That simplicity, says Henigan, was meant to help viewers learn about the future: as episodes become more revealing and Vecna’s list of victims accumulates, the lead voice develops.

“The brothers wanted to make sure everyone knew it was time to go home, which they didn’t. Weird stuff– is still heard. As the episodes go on, so does the scene. [victim No. 2] Fred [played by Logan Riley Bruner]So we take the timbre and go down six or eight mids and adjust the pitch. If you listen carefully, you lower the pitch during the gong. Then he slows down and then he rings the gongs again and we’re back to his normal call again.

The moment someone from the main set is targeted, the voice rises. In the third episode, when Sadie Sink Max is haunted in the school hallway, the team started playing around with the Pitch-Down Gong effect and mixing in other standard clock sounds. “If you pick up a cello, hit a rock and it silently struts around, that’s what I use to rock myself. “If you listen to it again, you’ll hear the pop of a cello bow as it swings from left to right,” explained Henigan. We will do a lot of that in this show, where the sound will start normally and slowly increase to a Weird stuff The kind of voice that in this case gives you that adventurous, older, sighing voice.

He also performed another challenge to the eagle’s ears, linking the watch to the origins of how One Vecna ​​became: mindscape. [alternate dimension] And he sends one, in the seventh episode.

a good example of this Weird stuff The evolution of sound, he says, is how the source of the Demogorgon’s sound is actually the record company’s recordings. “We’ve come so far after three or four seasons that it’s a completely different language than what Demogorgon sounds like now,” he says. “But the advantage of sound and narration is the use of silence and calm. So we haven’t forgotten our roots, but of course everything has gotten bigger and when it’s this big cinematically, the soundtrack will follow and that’s where we end up in season four.”

It’s also not painful that season four still has the biggest budget. As the last two episodes are complete (final, episode nine, two and a half), Henigan and his team are currently in production, which has so far been well-received by the horror series Dark Age, and he says the last two episodes continue. what 1 volume started.

“The last two episodes are huge. All parts collected will be refunded [in the final two episodes]”- he says and be careful not to give out spoilers. “There’s a whole massive controversy between Eleven and Vekna; “They had a little laugh in the trailers.”

Expect Vecna’s voice to be more uniform, just bigger. And of course the clock turned.

“The clock has a huge history”, he jokes. “It’s extreme rock where they left off. This is really the culmination of the last episode. And the clock has a lot to do with that.”

Volume 1 of strange things 4 Available now on Netflix, the second volume will ship on July 1.