SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Since today is Halloween, we're going to close today's show talking about one of the most powerful tools in horror movies - a blood-curdling human scream. What does it take to create a scream that is truly horrifying, one that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up? NPR's Michelle Aslam found it's part art and part science.
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MICHELLE ASLAM, BYLINE: Director Brian De Palma's 1981 thriller "Blow Out" opens like a cheesy slasher film.
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ASLAM: The camera sneaks around a sorority house from the point of view of a malicious intruder. The breathing grows louder as the attacker finds their way into a bathroom and approaches a young woman in a shower stall. A knife appears in frame, and then she turns around.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (Screaming poorly).
JOHN TRAVOLTA: (As Jack Terry) God, the scream is terrible.
PETER BOYDEN: (As Sam) What cat did you strangle to get that?
TRAVOLTA: (As Jack Terry) The cat that you hired. That's her voice.
ASLAM: John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a horror movie sound designer. He's watching the scene in an editing booth with his director who isn't very happy with the actress' performance.
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BOYDEN: (As Sam) I want to run that back again. I want to hear the scream.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (Screaming poorly).
BOYDEN: (As Sam) Kill it. You're right. Now get something new.
ASLAM: So Jack the sound designer heads out on a mission to record a good scream. According to David Poeppel, a neuroscientist at NYU, you know it when you hear it.
DAVID POEPPEL: If you just ask someone on the street, what's a scream like? They say, well, it's something loud and it's a little higher than normal. But that's really not right. Really, it's the particular acoustic structure that elicits something in listeners.
ASLAM: That quality is called roughness, and Poeppel says it's inherent to fearful screams. The more roughness in a vocalization, the more alarming it feels. It demands our attention.
CAITLYN TREVOR: Essentially, when we scream, we push our vocal chords past what they're usually supposed to do. So you push them to a kind of point of distress. It's a very specific signal to our brain that's like, this is really important. This is real.
ASLAM: That's Caitlyn Trevor. She's an expert in music cognition, how our brains perceive and respond to sound. She says, whether they know it or not, horror movie composers are mimicking the human scream in their work for a similar intended effect. The most obvious example, of course, is the movie "Psycho."
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ASLAM: But you can hear it in more recent horror films, too, like Ari Aster's "Hereditary" or "Midsommar."
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TREVOR: You do see them, often to get roughness features, pushing instruments past their usual capabilities, which is what we do with our vocal chords. You can't help but physically react to these signals because they're just so deeply wired.
ASLAM: Though, Trevor says, we seem to have an intuitive sense for when something should demand legitimate distress.
TREVOR: We know that we have these different reactions to things that are art and things that are real life. You know, if you see a murder scene in a crime show, you're not having the same reaction if you were to see a real murder scene in real life.
ASLAM: That may be what makes scream queens worthy of their crowns. A loud, high pitched noise can make us flinch or jump in surprise. But the sound of real horror, it gets under our skin. It makes us confront, even for a brief moment, what it means to be the person who's crying out in terror. In the film "Blow Out" for instance, Jack finally finds the scream for his horror movie, and it rattles him to his core.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (Screaming).
BOYDEN: (As Sam) Now, that's a scream. More, more, more...
ASLAM: We hear a scream, and we know someone's afraid. And somewhere in that sound, it's the unsettling recognition that we, too, know what it is to be frightened, to feel helpless and to want someone to hear us.
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TRAVOLTA: (As Jack Terry) It was a good scream.
ASLAM: Michelle Aslam, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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