For this trailer I focused on sound design, but the real weapon here wasn’t loud scares. It was silence. When you work on horror, you learn fast that the bang isn’t the scary part. The wait before the bang is where people start to tense up. I kept thinking about that Hitchcock quote: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” It fits perfectly.
So I built the world with glitches, whispers, strange digital noises, and then pulled everything away to nothing. Silence only works if something around it changes — maybe the mix gets thinner, maybe the stereo image collapses, maybe a little detail pops up that makes you think the moment is over. And just when your brain relaxes, the sound comes back in the wrong place and your body jumps.
There wasn’t a lot of heavy processing. It was mostly choosing the right moments to drop the floor out. Timing makes the silence scary. I liked this one because the tension didn’t rely on giant hits or screaming monsters, just the feeling that something is getting closer through the screen, but you can’t see it.
