Sounds Scary!

Film: Undertone
Format: Streaming video from HBO on gigantic television.

One of the issues that horror has as a genre is that what scares us is always going to be subjective. While there are certainly some visceral things that will get to a lot of people, some things work on us and other things don’t. Look at The Blair Witch Project, for instance. You can find horror fans who think it’s one of the worst horror movies ever made, and you’ll find others (like one of my brothers) who considers it one of the scariest movies in history. I bring this up because I get the sense that this kind of divergence of opinion will be the norm for Undertone (or undertone if you prefer the more stylized version of the title).

Before we launch into the movie itself, I want to talk about the aspect of this that needs to be discussed in some detail regardless of anyone’s actual opinion on the film. Undertone is an exercise in minimalism. While there is a full cast for this film, only a couple of actors appear on camera, with everyone else appearing only as voices through the phone or over the internet. Undertone was made for about half a million dollars, close to a shoestring these days, and while that’s obvious in retrospect, it’s not obvious while the movie is running.

Evy Babic (Nina Kiri) is half of a podcasting duo with her partner Justin (Adam DiMarco). The two of them run a horror podcast called The Undertone. The two are a podcast version of Mulder and Scully, with Evy taking the Scully role as the eternal skeptic and Justin believing in every story they discuss. We don’t really ever hear an episode of their show, but it appears that the idea of the show is that Justin provides her with a ghost story that he accepts uncritically and she attempts to debunk.

What we need to know before we address their current podcast episode is Evy’s living situation. Evy has returned home to tend to her mother, who is comatose and dying. Meanwhile, she and Justin are addressing their current podcasting story—a series of ten audio files that Justin has received from an anonymous email account. The files tell the story of Mike and Jessa (Jeff Yung and Keana Lyn Bastidas). Jessa has been talking in her sleep, and to make things as creepy as possible, she’s been singing children’s songs like London Bridge. Justin, looking to poke the bear, plays her singing backwards, looking for (and finding) secret and hidden messages. This causes Evy to investigate other children’s songs, finding other disturbing messages in them.

As the recordings go on, they become more and more disturbing and unhinged. The backwards speech continues with Jessa chanting “ouzyba ni emoc” over and over in the recordings. Played backwards, they discover her saying “Come in, Abyzou,” with Abyzou being a demon from folklore who is said to cause miscarriages and cause mother to murder their own children since she was infertile and jealous of women. It’s around this time we’re going to find out that Evy is six weeks pregnant.

Undertone works entirely because of sound, and that’s going to be frustrating for some people. One of the realities of horror is that often, the thing that is supposed to scare us becomes a lot less scary the moment we actually see it. What we have going on in our imagination is often much more terrifying than anything that we can be shown. Again, see The Blair Witch Project for an example of this. And that’s going to work for some people and really not work for others, which is why Undertone has had such a varied response from the audience.

The entire film, or at least virtually all of it, is focused on the work of Nina Kiri, who is almost always the only person on screen. We’re going to spend a great deal of the film looking at her listening to these recordings with noise-cancelling headphones, and it’s entirely on her to hold the frame and hold our attention, and she does. In fact, because so much of the horror comes from sound, a great deal of the scares come from expectations that something is going to come from behind her. Undertone is spent waiting for the jump scare, honestly. Again, that’s either going to work for you or it’s not.

I appreciate the fact that Undertone really tries to go for something different. It’s a film that worked for me. It’s unsettling in all of the ways that a good horror movie should be. I understand that this is going to be a controversial opinion for some people, but I stand by it—it worked for me, even if (and often because of) everything is auditory, not visual.

Why to watch Undertone: It provides more than its share of the creeps.
Why not to watch: Virtually all of the horror relies entirely on sound, and that might not work for everyone.