I make no secret of my love of the dark ambient music genre. It sets such a great uneasy mood, and I have always thought that it works really well in haunt settings. With no recognizable patterns or vocals, the audio sits nicely in the background, supporting and heightening the tension of the haunt setting, never becoming a distracting focus.
For years I have been using various dark ambient tracks in my yard haunt, and in the last 4 or 5 I have settled on what I have found to be a perfect track. A wonderful, dark balance of creepiness and eerie foreboding. I absolutely love this track and every time I play it, it instantly takes me into the middle of my yard haunt display...
Enjoy the unofficial haunt soundtrack of Highbury Cemetery, artist Jeff Greinke's 1992 dark ambient masterpiece, The Moor.
So as I load up and take the very last pieces of this year's haunt display back to the storage unit, I see not Metal From The Sky, but I do see tiny white flakes from the sky...
A true sign that Halloween is over for another year is when tiny snowflakes begin to fall. But truth be told, I'm ready for the start of winter. The cold season. Bring on the darkness!
It's a truly relaxing feeling knowing that after the constant excitement and frantic intensity of the Halloween season, everything has now been put away for another year and I can finally decompress and do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for a couple of weeks. Add to that a full sense of contentment from the fun and success of this year's Halloween celebration. This past October has been a damn good one!
And while I sit here in my subdued Saturday bliss, I wanna share one more dark ambient track for the season. I think it's a perfect soundtrack for our dark transition from Autumn into the coming Winter.
I discovered Jeff Greinke's work a few years back, and used his absolutely incredible track The Moor as my haunt soundtrack since then.
This track goes back to his beginnings (and the beginnings of the dark ambient genre itself). Recorded in 1985, Metal From The Sky still holds up to any of the current offerings in the genre with its dark, richly layered, desolate ambience. So stark, yet so completely soothing. Especially on a dreary day with nothing to do. Enjoy!
But wait. We're not done. Stop back tomorrow as I have one last traditional thing to do before I turn out the lights on this year's Halloween season! I'm pretty excited with this one and I can't wait to share it with you all.
I make no secret of my love of the dark ambient music genre. It sets such a great uneasy mood, and I have always thought that it works really well in haunt settings. With no recognizable patterns or vocals, the audio sits nicely in the background, supporting and heightening the tension of the haunt setting, never becoming a distracting focus.
For years I have been using various dark ambient tracks in my yard haunt, and in the last 3 or 4 I have settled on what I have found to be a perfect track. A wonderful, dark balance of creepiness and eerie foreboding. I absolutely love this track and every time I play it, it instantly takes me into the middle of my yard haunt display...
Enjoy the unofficial haunt soundtrack of Highbury Cemetery, artist Jeff Greinke's 1992 dark ambient masterpiece, The Moor.
We're getting down to the final hours of prep time until the big night! Still so much to do, but all of my cemetery audio has been loaded and is ready to spread some dread throughout the display!
I've decided to use Jeff Greinke's incredible 1992 dark ambient audio track, "The Moor" again for my my main audio track. I have used it for the past 3 or 4 years now, but I keep coming back to it. It really is a perfect track to use. The ominous ambient sounds perfectly blanket the cemetery scene, staying in the background and supporting the display. It helps build an atmosphere of fright and unease as the trick-or-treaters brave a walk through the ghastly cemetery and into a cold, dark crypt to receive their reward!
Last night I got a chance to briefly step away from all things Halloween when Mrs. Highbury and I went to see Blade Runner 2049. This was quite a treat because the last film I actually saw in the theater was Rogue One!
I won't go into any spoilers or even a full review, but I will say that I ABSOLUTELY loved it. As I was watching the visually gorgeous film, my brain began to think back to Halloween, and more specifically, my yard haunt display.
As the film played, I immediately noticed the attention that color played in every single shot. And because of the overarching dystopian feel of the film, it relied on bold, monotone swatches of muted earthy tones throughout. Especially during the scenes in Las Vegas. The sepia and orange was really blown out, giving it an incredibly harsh, arid feel. Does that color palette remind you of anything?
These scenes got me thinking about haunt displays in general, and how sometimes too many colors can actually work against you. And I think I'm a bit guilty of it, as well. Everything has a different spotlight color and before you know it, you actually have a Christmas display. Yuck. With all of theses colors competing for attention, the display loses a main focal point and everything becomes a jumbled mess.
This idea of color was carried out in other scenes, too.
Even with the scenes using cool colors, the palette was kept to a minimum, ensuring a dark, uneasy feel. The sparse use of highlight colors and an abundance of shadow worked incredibly well to produce a very specific feeling.
It's something that I am now going to explore more thoroughly in my haunt display. Pull back all of those competing spotlight colors and use the dark, shadow areas more prominently. I'm hoping that with less color, I may be able to actually evoke more atmosphere. This is something I hope to develop further and write more about this season.
Sound
The true effectiveness of Blade Runner 2049 was the union of two elements. The incredibly stylized, minimally-colored visuals plus an equally effective, minimal soundtrack to support them.
An effective haunt soundtrack is something that I have been exploring for some time now, as evidenced by how many music-based posts I have here. When I first began doing a yard haunt, I chose an old novelty Halloween cassette full of the standard, silly screams, moans and howls, and various rattles, clanks, jangles and skreetches.
But as my musical tastes continued to develop and evolve, I settled on the dark ambient genre to use in my display. It has an eerie, grating, uneasy feel about each track, and when it was paired with the visuals in the display, it works perfectly in the scene setting.
I really believe that the audio portion should support the visuals from behind, enhancing the look, and more importantly feel, of the display. With the old cassette, instantly recognizable sounds and vocals pulled the attention from the imagery to that sound effect. With dark ambient, you have a continuous sound effect that never jumps out and pulls the attention away. It supports and enhances the creepiness of the display and adds to the overall tension that we as haunters strive for.
The same idea was used in Blade Runner 2049. Some epic synthesizer notes combined with grading, somewhat industrial sounds and primal, tribal drum beats combine to really punch up the uneasy feeling of those beautifully colored scenes.
I have already downloaded the full soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, and while I don't plan on using it in my display, I do tend to use it as an important source of inspiration for effective use of sound and how it relates to visual display.
In specific regards to use of audio in my haunt display, I will be using Jeff Greinke's amazing dark ambient track from 1992, entitled, "The Moor." A completely creepy track on its own, but sits wonderfully behind the visuals in my cemetery display and enhances the uneasiness of the entire atmosphere. I will also add a few sparse, targeted sound effects in specific scene areas, but this track will be heard throughout the scene.
So there is my quick, personal take on the balance of sight and sound and its effect in Halloween haunt displays. Drop a comment below and let me know your take.
If you haven't yet, I HIGHLY recommend you get out to see Blade Runner 2049, preferably in a full digital theater with a good surround-sound system, and immerse yourself in a complete feast for the eyes and ears for a couple of hours.
It's back to the standard Halloween grind for me, because as I glance at the old Halloween countdown calendar, we're down to just over 2 weeks to get it all done for the big night. I still have a few more projects to get done, along with a big announcement that I hope to share with everyone next week, as well as a slew of Halloween posts to get through! The sun is shining and the air is still warm in these parts, so it's time to get out to the garage and get some serious work done today. Everyone have a great October weekend!!
I wanted to take a second to share with everyone the audio that I used in this year's yard haunt. I'm always on the lookout for the next great track to use in my haunt, and I usually gravitate toward dark ambient tracks. They provide a dark and creepy sound that fills the yard, yet manages to stay in the background, not becoming the focus. I find that these kinds of tracks support the visual aspect of the haunt perfectly. A constant, unrecognizable sound that instills atmospheric dread and discomfort. A week or two before Halloween, I discovered the track that would be used for the main cemetery audio. I honestly can't remember how exactly I stumbled upon this track, but once I heard it, I knew that was the track to use. Pioneering dark ambient artist Jeff Greinke has been composing music since 1984, but it was a track from his 1992 release Lost Terrain that really caught my attention. His track The Moor sets a perfect mood of layered dread that slowly creeps from the dark corners of the cemetery. A truly eerie track that waited 22 years to be used in my Halloween setting!
On top of this main track echoing throughout the front yard, I used a support track for my front porch crypt. I picked this track solely for the purpose of supporting my newest prop, Le Cadavre de Vodoun. When I heard this track, I new that it would fit perfectly as it swirled out from beneath the coffin, enveloping the two figures shrouded in foggy darkness (my mom and aunt!) as they handed out candy to the trick-or-treaters...
Alongside dark ambient, another go-to for audio inspiration for me has been horror movie soundtracks. The genre has been very popular lately, with stellar releases and re-releases coming out from great labels like Death Waltz, Mondo and Waxwork.
In September, Death Waltz released The Equestrian Vortex, a 10-inch record with tracks composed by Andrew Liles, using audio cues from the 2012 film, Berberian Sound Studio. While the prospect of a blue and yellow swirled 10-inch record excited me, hearing the cut from side two, Lord, We Beseech You stopped me in my tracks. Not so much a structured audio track as a long, demonic repetitive female chanting that added a whole new depth of creepiness to the crypt.
And unfortunately, I couldn't find the track online, so to hear it at Death Waltz, you have to first click on this link. On the menu to the left, click on the "Listen" tab. Then click on the little blue arrow icon next to "Side 2. Lord, We Beseech You" and be prepared to be creeped out. Together, these two tracks added the perfect underlying effect of dread that really supported the visual punch of my yard haunt. Over the past couple of years, I have really focused more on the audio aspect of my haunt and I no longer use the traditional "spooky sounds" tracks. I think going outside the standard audio selections can really take your haunt to a frightening, new level of terror and unease.
A cold, weathered hand pierces the rust-laden earth of a late autumn night. Reanimated decay becomes the evening's guide. Masked faces bask in the fiery glow of a jack-o-lantern's illumination. A lifeless finger points the direction toward the next porch-lit house. For this is the night of ghouls and goblins and tricks and treats. This is the night of Hallowe'en...
