Berberian Sound Studio: Horror About the Making of Horror

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Here is a horror film that never once shows you a horror. You hear all of them. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) takes place inside a cramped Italian post-production facility in the 1970s, where a timid English sound engineer has been hired to do the audio for a lurid giallo — and Strickland’s camera stays glued to the mixing desk, the reels, the racks of equipment, and the faces of the people making the noises. The film on the screens is called The Equestrian Vortex, and we never see a frame of it beyond its own delirious animated title sequence. We only ever hear it, and hear the ordinary, faintly comic labour of faking it.

Peter Strickland - vo.rs

Berberian Sound Studio: Horror About the Making of Horror