How Horror Sounds

Do you have more splintering? IS there anything like 'straining at the door panel?'" asks Lawrence Kasdan. His sound designer, Bob Grieve, suggests that the music is too loud; the audience won't catch the kind of maple-busting noise Kasdan is looking for. Kasdan won't have it. That's because he knows that horror isn't so much shot as constructed. Even the most artful scared face looks stupid on the big screen if the computer-generated monster is cheesy, the sound effects flat, the silences too short or the cuts too slow. So compared with the rush of filming, say, My Dinner with Andre, making a horror movie is painful, boring, detail-obsessive work.

Kasdan is spending yet another afternoon in a movie theater on the Sony lot with Starfleet-level computer equipment and 12 other people, all of whom are trying to get the perfect sound effects for a two-minute segment in the middle of Dreamcatcher. After the discussion about the perfect sound of a bathroom door being broken, it's on to the moment where the worm falls off the main character's body onto the floor. "The thump is major. I've been waiting six months for it," Kasdan says excitedly. The conversation begins to resemble discussions normally reserved for freshman stoners. "Is there any wetness in it?" Kasdan inquires about the splat. "I think it needs a little more weight."

Kasdan isn't the person you would expect to be doing this. He's the guy who makes smart, touching, talky movies--The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, Body Heat--not Dreamcatcher, the horror movie based on the 2001 Stephen King novel. "I read the book, and I thought, It's like a Kasdan story," the director says. "Except in my story they would go out in the woods and talk, and nothing would happen." But Kasdan was, after all, the writer of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark before directing many of what he calls "general humanist comedies," and he wanted a break from the character-driven stuff. "I had never done effects. Action isn't something I've done much," he says. "Those are the kinds of movies I react to. I like action."

Kasdan hasn't held back on it in Dreamcatcher, with snakelike aliens created by his friend George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic that have oval, teeth-packed mouths--clearly intended to be a Freudian nightmare--and a completely disgusting scene involving a toilet. "People say the scariest part of a movie is when you don't see something. Bulls___!" Kasdan says, chewing on a Twizzler while reviewing the sound of a door being opened by an alien, for which he requests additional "wet squeegee" noises. "I want to see something when I go to the movies."

Even though the dialogue was important to Kasdan, who co-wrote the screenplay with William Goldman, he admits that he really just wants to scare the dickens out of the audience. When asked why the aliens have come to Earth, he shrugs: "The usual. Real estate."