I love bad horror movies and I’ve noticed a common trend. They all seem to have super high pitched random background sounds that irritate the fuck out of me! Like I just got one of those Digimon 20th anniversary guys a few months ago, and just noticed after the battery died I’ll be hearing it cry while watching bad horror movies. I’m an older millennial who took great care of my hearing in my younger days so tomorrow isn’t an issue. But I hear these high pitched sounds that make me wonder if the battery was really dead, only to check out my digivice and find that it is still completely dead.
I remember reading something from a sound editor for movies and TV. Essentially no director wants to halt production and re-do a scene because the audio is bad. It’s pretty hard to redo a scene if the camera didn’t get a good shot, it’s even harder if the camera was good but the audio was off. Most directors will just say “Just fix it in post”.
But, there aren’t really enhancements for audio. A bad segment of audio is always bad. You can’t just amplify the hell out of it and have it sound good. So the lower the budget the movie, the more costly it is to redo a shot, and the more likely they’ll tell the sound guys that they’ll have to deal with it.
Actors used to be on the hook for overdub voice work after shooting wrapped. I don’t know if that’s still the case.
Honestly, I’m more concerned about high budget movies where I can’t understand a fucking word. I know there have been many articles and YouTube videos on the subject, but there’s really no excuse for that nonsense.