Finding a place in Hollywood is not easy. And even less as a sound engineer. But Mitzi Ives, the protagonist of Random House, Chuck Palahniuk's new book, has achieved it thanks to the secret – and gloomy – techniques that her father taught her. Her competition looks at her with envy. Only she is capable of getting actors to recreate horrifying screams for horror movies that sound so plausible and shocking that they could very well be real. Quite a merit, because making a movie truly scary is not an easy task. There are many factors that allow the viewer to end up with goosebumps. The screams, and the verisimilitude of these, indeed, 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 in this profession since 1959 and has dubbed several horror films, “although they are not the ones I like to dub the most, not even as a viewer.” The first was Psycho in which she voiced the character of Janet Leigh, murdered in the famous shower scene by the psychopath Norman Bates.
“It is a film that has marked many people. Almost everyone who gets into a shower with a plastic curtain goes quickly,” she says with a laugh. Although she points out that dubbing Sigourney Weaver as Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien saga was harder: “I was scared to death every time that bug came out, and it got everywhere. And it's not that it's exactly horror, but it has a little point of making the viewer nervous."
It has never been difficult for him to scream at a scary scene because "I scream the first time when they show it on the screen because it scares me," but he emphasizes that "you have to scream, making sure that, if they happen many times in a row, they are at the end of the call because, if not, after half an hour you have to leave because you have lost your voice.” As a curiosity, the actress has also dubbed Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh, in all the films in the Halloween saga. “They are tremendous for my taste because so many have been made that in the end you say: 'Another one! But what are they going to explain to me, let them kill him now!
His son, Sergio Zamora, shares a profession. He regularly voices Colin Farrell, Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey and Joaquin Phoenix. Precisely, he recalls that although it was not a horror film, Phoenix's laughter in Joker "was terrifying, histrionic and hysterical" and they were quite "complicated." He recognizes that in horror films normally “the women scream more and the men are the bad guys.” He has played the villain in the anime television series Death Note or the movie Cherry Falls. “Few screams, really. It is up to us men to make more war cries,” he admits.
Mark Ullod has been in the profession for 35 years. Characters such as Don Prince, the antagonist of Tim Burton's mythical Big Fish, have passed through his experience; or Punisher, a Marvel antihero “who forced me to speak very softly and inwardly, but who, suddenly, began to scream like an animal. He would go from zero to one hundred in a matter of seconds.” He explains that, as a general rule, “an actor is in charge of his own shouts and, if he doesn't come out the way he plays, he repeats himself.” There are few exceptions in which one partner sneaks into another's recording. “But sometimes it happens, although not so much with screaming. I started my dubbing career with a burp. It sounds harsh, but that's how it is. He was working at the time as a production assistant and was dubbing into Catalan for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And there was a moment when Danny DeVito burped and his voice actor, the great Joaquín Díaz, couldn't get it out. 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 yesteryear it was more common for some screams to resort to stock sounds. The best known is the Wilhelm scream, which managed to sneak into several productions. It was used for the first time in 1951 in the film Drums Far Away and, although its author is unknown, it is believed that it could be by 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 gruesome effect on the environment and the plot is the work of a technician or sound engineer, like Byron Abadía, who, in addition to being in charge of post-production, has created his own library. of sounds, available to anyone who wishes to acquire them for their work.
“When you are looking for a specific sound for a fiction, creativity comes into play. For example, rain is very common in horror movies. It makes me happy when I recreate it because I have breakfast, since you can get it by putting bacon in a pan with a lot of oil. If you put the microphone close to that sizzle, you achieve 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 simulate that a zombie is eating.
Lorenzo Beteta is always very attentive to 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 interpreters. I want them to only know what is essential so that, when the time comes, they are surprised and scared, just as their characters are. They read the script when they arrive at the studio and do not take it home, to achieve greater naturalness and so that a scene is not practiced too much, so it will not sound fake."
In the 42 years he has been in the profession, he recognizes that there has been a notable evolution in dubbing techniques, although he looks expectantly at what may happen with artificial intelligence. “The dubbing sector is in serious talks with distributors so that clauses can be added to contracts that prevent our work from educating AI. That is, it stores our voices, memorizes our intonations, and learns them to create something from scratch. The time is not far away when we see a movie starring the actor we normally dub and hear our voice without us having done that work. That is why it is so important that legislation is now established,” he reflects.
This and other questions, beyond the art of dubbing, are some of the questions that he debates in class with his students at the Madrid Dubbing School, where he has been teaching for years. “It is important that they know the current panorama and what may come,” as well as other basic issues, such as “they must understand that dubbing is a work of imitation and not creation. You imitate what is already done and translate it into the appropriate language. Therefore, although dubbing gains more and more visibility, we must not forget that being anonymous works in our favor, since we will be able to not associate voices and the character will sound more plausible. That is our main objective and we must not forget it.”
His students and future voice actors are very aware of this and other aspects, such as that “it is essential that our body barely moves, since the microphone captures all noises. Panting without jumping, crying without being sad or screaming without barely moving your body is very complicated. I usually hold my hands tightly and put them to my chest so that they don't move involuntarily,” says José Luís Prada. His classmate, Sara Ibancos, does something similar, although she concludes that “the most complicated thing is not to stay still, but to generate that tension that will allow the scream to sound like real terror.”
