from Warcraft II playing during this movie? They played it more than once, near the end, when the Babadook is present.
It really took me out of the movie. Why did they take a cheesy sound effect from a mid-90s computer game and put it in a movie that was this scary?
Yep that ruined the movie for me to, thanks for pointing out where the sound is from, it sounded so familiar but i couldn't put my finger on it..
For me its a 6* movie at max...
The noise is definitely Sharp tooth from land before time, thought it as soon as I heard!
shareMaybe its a public domain sound. Or maybe Warcraft II ripped off LBT and Babadook ripped it off too.
shareThe noise is definitely Sharptooth from Land Before Time, thought it as soon as I heard it!
Thank you!
I came here to see if anyone else thought the same thing.
Great movie none the less.
I don't suffer from insanity, I actually enjoy it
I hear the velociraptor from Jurassic park 3 in a few parts
shareWhy did they take a cheesy sound effect from a mid-90s computer game and put it in a movie that was this scary?
For the same reason the Babadook itself shares familiar visual aspects of classic horror characters. Why isolate only the sound effect when the visuals also blatantly referenced previous classics?
Jennifer Kent is a lifelong horror fan. She worked closely with her sound designer, Frank Lipson. She was intentionally going for a familiar sound effect.
The monster's familiar elements implied that rather than being some external force, it was self-created - that Amelia's imagination had rearranged elements she was recently exposed to, and given them fresh, twisted life. Kent took familiar elements and mixed them together, which as a whole, rendered the monster unique, yet at the same time disconcertingly familiar.
The very familiarity of some sounds and imagery implied that Amelia's exhausted psyche, heavily influenced by recent late night TV binges, had exploited them - as nightmares do - as creative fodder (the infestation of roaches, for example, another familiar horror element).
To me it is more frightening to realize that the monster was the result of a weakened, troubled mind taking familiar influences and making them real (and potentially deadly), than a force of some external origin imposing itself on them.
The monster is a Frankensteinian composite of both visual and aural familiar horror movie elements recently absorbed by Amelia, and given life. She was compelled to watch a succession of classic horror and fantasy films, ranging back to the silent era. Both images and sounds are familiar to fans of the genre, and Amelia's monster is clearly a pastiche of these influences, again both visual and aural. There are many to savour, including Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, Lon Chaney in London After Midnight, The Fall of the House of Usher, and so on.
This is the same process by which killers have acted out pathological fantasies that clearly simulated elements of movies and video games they'd obsessively watched and played. Warcraft among them.
For example, the Norwegian man who murdered 77 people on July 22, 2011:
"Five years before the massacre, Breivik isolated himself in a room at his mother’s flat; he saw practically no one, refused visits, hardly ever went out, and just sat inside playing computer games, World of Warcraft mostly, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month."(The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker, May 25, 2015 issue.)
"When I was creating this creature, I always went back to what I loved and what felt right. It was never, 'Let’s do what hasn’t been done before'... The actual elements of Mister Babadook are just things that irk or scare me in real life, and also things I love, like silent cinema and silent horror."Sound effects were treated in the same fashion as the visuals. One may not like some of the results, but all creative choices are risks.
Sounds like post facto rationalization of a mistake. It really made babadook into a silly little toy rather than something to be feared
shareAgain, why isolate only the sound effect when the visuals blatantly referenced classic horror images? Perhaps you're not complaining about them because they're unfamiliar to you. This film is an interesting case because I've never read anyone familiar with the many visual borrowings ever complain about them.
"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson
because what is chosen to be referenced is just not scary. Nosferatu etc..
Classic - classic horror is not particularly scary anyways for the modern sensibility. It's more appreciated for it's visual style with it's odd charm, than it's ability to scare, these days. So this dichotomy really does nullifies the filmmakers attempts to immerse the audience in the protagonists horror.
I think the key here is frame of reference. These images and sounds aren't meant to be experienced directly and in isolation, but indirectly by watching the character watching and hearing them. We rarely experience anything in the story's world without our senses being influenced by the warped prism of Amelia's perspective. That is, the main generator of fear isn't external - even the Bababook itself - but our intimate experience of Amelia's response to it, her interpretation, her growing obsession with and vulnerability to it.
As mentioned, the very familiarity of some sounds and imagery implied that her psyche had exploited them as creative fodder - exactly as nightmares do. The monster's explictly childlike pop-up book quality isn't particularly scary in theory, in isolation, but it's a different matter - a different frame - when our experience of it angles intimately through Amelia.
Jennifer Kent:
"The world of the film is a kind of pop-up book, if you like—it extends from the book Amelia and Sam read together."I also mentioned that this frame of mind is the identical kind by which killers have acted out pathological fantasies that clearly simulated elements of movies and video games they'd obsessively watched and played. Warcraft among them. (Referring to earlier quote about the Norwegian mass murderer.) Is Warcraft particularly scary? Likely not. But Warcraft experienced through the perspective of a man losing his mind is, again, a different matter.
"The actual elements of Mister Babadook are just things that irk or scare me in real life, and also things I love, like silent cinema and silent horror. It’s so old now, obviously, but it was beautiful because of how influenced it was by theater. And then we got so literal and we lost that. When did that happen?""Literal," i.e., not primal, or at least not accessing memory of the primal response.
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Hyperbole much, dude? Seriously, it's not about how serious the topic is, it's about my interest in it. If you get your kicks belittling someone's interest in a topic, then the problem ain't with them.
"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson
Well, Nosferatu creeped me out and some other people, it's still getting praised. It must be doing something right for such an old movie then.
shareI think the sound effect was added just to be campy, kind of like the Wilhelm scream
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