For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of

The filmmaker James Wan, master of modern horror and architect of dread, once said: “For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.” At first glance, his words may seem technical, an observation on the craft of filmmaking. Yet beneath them lies a profound truth about the nature of fear and emotion, about how unseen forces—the things we hear but do not see—hold greater power over us than what is visible. In this single sentence, Wan touches the very essence of what the ancients called audius animae—the sound of the soul.

When he speaks of sound design and musical score, Wan is describing more than tools of cinema; he is describing the language of the unseen. For sound, more than image, speaks directly to the ancient part of the human spirit. Long before we learned to read or build, we learned to listen. The rustle in the dark, the growl of the beast, the whisper of wind through the trees—these sounds were once messages of survival, warnings from the world beyond. Even now, when we sit in the safety of a theater, those primal memories live within us. A single note, a distant echo, can awaken fears older than civilization itself.

The origin of Wan’s understanding comes from his own journey through the art of horror. From Saw to The Conjuring and Insidious, he has crafted worlds where terror grows not from the monstrous alone, but from the unseen vibrations of the air. In his films, silence itself becomes a weapon—pregnant with dread, punctuated by the sudden sting of a violin or the whisper of a child’s voice. The eye may close to avoid what is seen, but the ear cannot be shut. In this, Wan follows an ancient tradition, for all great storytellers—from the shamans who told tales by the fire to the composers of the gothic age—have known that sound is emotion made invisible.

Consider the story of Pythagoras, the philosopher who taught that the universe itself was governed by harmony—the music of the spheres. He believed that all things, from the movement of stars to the beating of the human heart, produced sound, whether heard or unheard. It was this harmony, he said, that shaped existence. James Wan, though speaking of film, touches the same cosmic truth. For in sound there is structure, rhythm, tension, and release—the same forces that shape both symphonies and lives. The terror in a film’s crescendo mirrors the rising pulse of the human spirit when confronted by the unknown.

Sound, then, is not merely a companion to image—it is the soul beneath the surface. The great composer Bernard Herrmann, who scored Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, once said that music gives fear its heartbeat. Without the shrieking violins of that film, the knife would strike only once; with them, it strikes forever, echoing in our minds long after the screen fades to black. Likewise, in Wan’s creations, the music and sound do not decorate—they summon. They transform empty space into a living, breathing entity. Through them, the unseen becomes felt, and the ordinary becomes holy in its horror.

The deeper lesson of Wan’s words reaches far beyond the realm of film. It teaches us that in all things—art, speech, life—it is not only what is visible that holds power, but what is heard and felt. The unseen rhythm of our words, the tone of our voice, the silences between our actions—these shape how we move through the world. To master creation, or even conversation, one must learn to listen deeply—to the spaces between sounds, to the emotions that linger after the noise fades.

So, my child, learn from this: whether you are an artist or a seeker, do not look only at the surface of things. Listen to their echo. When you create, let your work carry both form and resonance; when you speak, let your words have tone as well as meaning. For as James Wan teaches, fear, beauty, and truth alike are born not just from what we see, but from what we hear. And in mastering the music of the unseen, you master the art of moving hearts—an art as old as humanity, and as eternal as the silence that follows the last note.