Making a place in Hollywood is not easy. And less so as a sound engineer. But Mitzi Ives, the protagonist of The Invention of Sound ), the new book by Chuck Palahniuk, has succeeded thanks to the secret – and sinister – techniques that her father taught her. The competition looks at her with envy. Only she can get actors to recreate horrifying screams for horror movies that sound so believable and chilling they might as well be real. Quite a credit, as getting a movie to really scare you is no easy task. There are many factors that allow the viewer to end up with goosebumps. The screams, and the verisimilitude of these screams, are an example. Interpretation is essential, but in the case of a foreign film, the work of the dubbing actor comes into play.
The veteran María Luisa Solá, who has just turned 85, has been working in this profession since 1959 and has dubbed several horror films, “although they are not the ones I like the most, not even as a viewer”. The first was Psycho in which he lent his voice to the character of Janet Leigh, murdered in the famous shower scene by the psychopath Norman Bates.
“It is a film that has marked a lot of people. Almost everyone who walks into a shower with a plastic curtain goes fast,” he says with a laugh. Although he points out that dubbing Sigourney Weaver as Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien saga was more difficult: “I was very scared every time that critter came out, which got everywhere. And it’s not that it’s actually horror, but it has the ability to make the viewer nervous.”
It has never been difficult for him to scream before a scary scene because, he says: “I scream the first time when they run the tape on the screen because I get scared”, but he adds that “you have to scream trying to ensure that, if it happens many times in a row , be at the end of the call because, if not, after half an hour you have to leave because you are speechless”. As a curiosity, the actress has also voiced Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh’s daughter, in all the films of the Halloween saga. one more! What will they explain to me again, let them kill him already!
His son, Sergio Zamora, shares the profession. He regularly dubs Colin Farrell, Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey and Joaquin Phoenix. Precisely, he recalls that even if it wasn’t a horror film, Phoenix’s laugh in Joker “was terrifying, histrionic and hysterical” and was quite “complicated”. He acknowledges that in horror films usually “women scream more and men are the bad guys”. He has played the villain in the anime TV series Death Note or in the film Harry Falls. “Of few shouts, the truth. It’s up to us men to make more war cries”, he admits.
Mark Ullod has been working in this profession for 35 years. He has created characters such as Don Prince, the antagonist of the mythical Big Fish, by Tim Burton; or Punisher, a Marvel anti-hero “who forced me to speak very softly and introspectively, but who, suddenly, started screaming like an animal. It made me go from zero to a hundred in a matter of seconds.” He explains that, as a general rule, “an actor is in charge of his screams and, if it doesn’t come out as he should, it is repeated”. Exceptions are counted in which a partner participates in the recording of another. “But sometimes it happens, although it doesn’t happen so much with the screams. I started my dubbing career with a bang. It sounds strong, but it is true. He was then working as a production assistant and was dubbing in Catalan for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And there was a moment when Danny DeVito took a turn and his voice actor, the great Joaquín Díaz, couldn’t do it. My father, who was the director and knew me well, asked me to come on stage and burp. And yes, you could say that’s how it all started.”
In the Hollywood of olden times, it was more common to resort to stock sounds for some screams. The best known is the cry Wilhelm, which managed to sneak into several productions. It was used for the first time in the 1951 film Distant Drums and, although its author is unknown, it is believed that it could be from the American actor Sheb Wooley, one of the protagonists of the film.
Adapting that scream to a film and adding and creating other effects that achieve a more truculent atmosphere is the job of a technician or sound engineer, like Byron Abadía, who in addition to being in charge of post-production, has created the its own library of sounds, available to anyone who wants to acquire them for their work.
“When you’re looking for a specific sound for a piece of fiction, creativity comes into play. For example, in horror movies, rain is very common. It makes me happy when I recreate it because I have breakfast, since you can get it by putting bacon in a pan with enough oil. If you bring the microphone closer to that spot, you get the effect. Or to make something sound like a broken bone we use lettuce and carrots. Oranges, on the other hand, go very well to pretend that a zombie is eating.”
Lorenzo Beteta is always very dependent on both the sound engineers and the dubbing actors. He himself is one, but he has also been a director for years. “I barely give information to the performers. I want them to know only the essentials so that, when the time comes, they will be surprised and scared, as their characters do. They read the script when they get to the studio and don’t take it home, to achieve more naturalness and not to over-rehearse a scene, so it won’t sound forced”.
In the 42 years that he has been working in this profession, he recognizes that there has been a remarkable evolution in dubbing techniques, although he looks expectantly at what can happen with artificial intelligence. “The dubbing sector is in serious talks with distributors so that clauses are added to the contracts that prevent our work from educating the AI. That is, to store our voices, memorize the intonations, and learn them to create something from scratch. The moment is not far off when we find a film starring the actor we normally dub for, and we hear our voice without us having done the work. That is why it is so important that legislation be established now”, he reflects.
This and other questions, beyond the art of dubbing, are some of the ones he debates in class with the students of the Madrid Dubbing School, where he has been teaching for years. “It is important that they know the current landscape and what may come”, as well as other basic issues, such as “they must understand that dubbing is a job of imitation and not of creation. You imitate what he has already done and translate it into the language he touches. For this reason, even if dubbing is gaining more and more visibility, we must not forget that being anonymous plays in our favor, since we will manage not to associate voices and make the character sound more believable. This is our main objective and we must not forget it”.
His students and future dubbers are very mindful of this and other aspects, as “it is essential that our body barely moves, as the microphone picks up all the noises. Panting without jumping, crying without being sad or squealing without moving any part of the body is very complicated. I usually hold my hands tightly and stick them to my chest so they don’t move involuntarily”, explains José Luis Prada. Her classmate, Sara Ibancos, does something similar, but concludes that “the most complicated thing is not to be still, but to manage to generate the tension that will allow the scream to sound like real terror”.