Now What?
I'll try to post a few more things here & there... but I am by & large out of any meaty, quality Halloween stuff I can share.
Sorry....
I kinda hopped into the countdown on a whim... Even so, I do think some of my posts will help enhance folks' Halloween experience this year.
This one, in particular.
I grew up in the 1970's.. so my ears are geared to the sound effects that ended up in movies, specials on tv, on the radio, and on loads of old Halloween records. There are certain sounds I immediately recognize & love, that put me immediately into a fun-lovin', retro Halloween mood.
Here are a bunch of them:
1. The "Barking Wolf" howl
2. "Castle Thunder"
3. Deep Ghost Moan
4. The 'Dinner With Drac' stalking monster intro
5. The 'Dragging Chain Limp' -a la Monster Mash or 'Sounds to Make You Shiver'
6. Ghostly Wailing Theremin(?)
7. Witch's Laugh -from the Winchell's Donut Halloween record
8. Monster Growls - a la Sounds To Make You Shiver
9. The 'Lady Wilhelm'
-- This is a female voice screaming that I hear all the time in ads...almost as often as the 'Wilhelm' scream-- thus, I believe they are inextricably linked: 'Husband & wife', if you will.
10. The 'Triple Threat' scream-- yet another scream that seems to be used a lot on that old Halloween Vinyl!
11. "Watch Out For Ghosts" - Winchell's scary donuts again...
12. "Whistling Wind"
13. The Wilhelm Scream.. one of the most famous, most used sound effects in modern movie history
Seriously... the Wilhelm Scream is used in loads of films. But I Digress....
Anyway, I love all these sound effects, and I hope they exist forever:
Click here for Essential Halloween Sound Effects.
Labels: countdown, sound effects
posted by HarveyMidnight at 10:36 AM
2 Comments:
I'm sort of a sound effects geek myself, although the Halloween record I grew up with was the Disney one, although I did have the Pickwick ghost stories record and the other Pickwick release with the fake Monster Mash and the sounds of horror. I like a lot of these very classic sounds, but I've always wondered exactly how old they are and where they originally came from. For example, I expect the wind effect in this file, and the other one that's real commonly used, like in "Sounds to Make you Shiver" are very old effects done before there was even tape, and might have been originally recorded on movie film for all I know. Now, I'm curious about track 6, the odd Theremin-like sound. That's been on so many Halloween records it ain't even funny. Now, it's debatable whether that sound is actually a Theremin or is it a musical saw? I tend to think it's a saw because a Theremin had a buzzier tone, at least Theremins of what I'm guessing is the Fifties. I kind of like the way it pans from one speaker to the other, though, and there's that odd tea-kettle sound along with it. Where was that originally drawn from, as the tag on the file said "Haunted House."
Speaking of Theremins, for years I had the Johnson-Smith horror record, and on side one there's a sequence where you hear a high-pitched ghosty noise, with the pitch rising and falling and wobbling and the volume going up and down, then a similar one in a lower human-like pitch. I didn't realize until recently that both of those were done by a Theremin. I always thought they got some guy to go in there and then first whistle and then hum and tey just spliced out all the in-takes of breath. Damn sound scared me as a kid because I thought the second one was an actual human being an not just a damn oscilator. Hahahaha!
Yeah I don't even know the origin of most of those... I've heard them mixed into countless other 'Halloween' tunes & records that date as far back as the 1960's... For that 'Theremin' one-- yeah, it may be a saw, or something else... who knows. I actually isolated this mp3 from the 'Haunted House' track on the Creed Taylor 'Shock' lp-- which is why the tag says 'Haunted House'. Oops-- I meant to fix all of those tags!
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