ABSTRACT
Correlations between sound and screen violence have been noted since the origins of sound cinema, but these discussions have become vital in light of increasingly explicit displays of destruction and devastation. With new technologies highlighting immersion, spectacle, and spectatorial engagement, the analysis of screen violence and its sonic incarnations is more important than ever. While it is arguably difficult to even define an entity known as (post-talkies) ‘screen violence’ that is separate from sound, in most of the pertinent literature, violence is an exclusively visual issue. Whether questioning on-screen depictions of violence from a sociological perspective (Barker and Petley 1997; Hill 1997), theorizing its relationship to apocalypticism (Dixon 2003; Sharrett 1999), discussing masculinity and race in American culture (Abel 2007; Gormley 2005; Gronstad 2008; Prince 1998), analyzing ethics (Saxton and Downing 2010), or considering it from a feminist perspective that accounts for cultural formations of femininity (Horeck 2003; Neroni 2012; Steenberg 2012; Tasker 1991; Young 2010), screen violence is primarily a visual, narrative, and stylistic issue. Other than Michel Chion’s brief chapter on the scream in horror cinema or Thomas Fahy’s article on classical music in serial killer films (which is, in fact, limited to musical choice as a function of character), scholarly work on screen violence evinces an emphatic bias for the visual (Chion 1994; Fahy 2003). While these works, as well as many others on new extremism, horror, and violence more generally, provide groundwork for the study of screen violence, they do not consider screen violence’s sonic implications. Similarly, although there are several recent texts analyzing film music in violent genre films, most notably horror and science-fiction films (Hayward 2009; Lerner 2010; Spadoni 2007; Whittington 2007), these do not address abstract research questions about violence, as they focus on specific directors and films rather than engage with broader questions of audiovisual violence itself.
