Ricky Grove 00:00
Ricky's wonderful world of sounds. Today's sound is monsters. What do monsters sound like? Primitive humans knew those sounds very well, because their lives depended upon it. They listened carefully for every screech, roar, chitter, slither and boom. Knowing the type of monster and the direction they were coming from triggered a specific tactic to either kill the monster or flee from it. Hearing became an essential weapon to fight monsters. Now, evolution and natural selection favored those humans whose hearing was acute, their response became instinctive, and its this instinctive response is what sound designers have used for over a century to trigger the fear response in modern audiences and their one rule for Monster sound design that is above all others, hear the monster before you see it.

Ricky Grove 01:16
My first experience of this rule was in the sci fi movie them from the 50s, a tale about ants mutated through atomic radiation to gigantic size. You hear the eerie sound they make long before you see them. The sound the ants makes is composed of multiple animal and environmental sounds mixed together in pitch, changed bird voiced tree frogs with additional bird calls and other noises, they resulted in an unnatural and unsettling effect that was not immediately recognizable as belonging to any real animal. Now, three key ideas to keep in mind when creating monster sounds always present the sound of the monster, before you see them, use altered animal and environmental sounds mixed and altered to create a unique sound and fit the monster sound to the type of monster is it a sea creature, a giant lizard, an alien. Some iconic monster sounds include the fantastic Godzilla roar, the alien creature predator, The Exorcist neck twist and demon growl, and the bada boop voice, and many, many more. By creating a monster sound that is similar to an animal sound, but made weird and strange, you will unnerve your audience and trigger their fear reaction over and over again.