The spirit in ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’

It took a heck of a lot more than a CD of haunted house sounds to give “The Haunting in Connecticut” its bumps in the night. Though nowhere did the postproduction work stand out more than in the climactic basement scene in which the undead spirit emerges from its sealed room to loom over Virginia Madsen. “That’s a scene that was created absolutely from scratch,” says editor Tom Elkins, who also created sound effects tracks with sound designer James Wallace. The original scene was one long take, with the ghost emerging behind Madsen and slowly approaching her. To heighten the fear, Elkins removed frames of film and replaced them with blackness to create the effect of the lights going out. He added the “dink-dink-dink” of fluorescent lights turning on to sell the effect. But to really create tension, Elkins added other layers of sounds -- bird wings flapping, teeth grinding, metal bending, wood creaking and then, for good measure, he screamed into a microphone. The key was to alternate the big sounds with the relative silence of the darkness.

“You have to be careful with the sound,” Elkins said. “If you don’t have dynamics, it just becomes an assault on your ears.”

-- Patrick Kevin Day