I was recently watching a scene from the 2025 film Weapons for a monograph I’m writing and noticed a familiar sound: a low, unsettling drone as a character walks down a hallway.

It’s the same kind of sound used in recent horror films such as Together (2025). You can also hear it throughout the trailer for the 2025 film Shelby Oaks, where sound throbs like an invisible threat.

We never see what’s making this sound or where it comes from within the film’s world, which only makes it more disturbing.

It’s become so common that, in The Filmmaker’s Guide to Horror, Danny Draven advises aspiring directors that if a terrified character is creeping through, for example, a dingy basement, they can create atmosphere with “a low drone or rumble”, and so on. “You can be very creative with these situations”, he writes.

This approach is now so embedded in the genre that film scholar William Whittington argues horror uses music and sound effects “far more aggressively and conceptually” than any other genre.

So why do horror films sound like this?

Horror existed well before synchronised sound arrived in the late 1920s. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and

© The Conversation