In storytelling, detail is everything. In Joshua Giuliano’s experimental horror In Sound, We Live Forever, unconventional perspective and a reimagining of audio leverage an exquisite attention to these details in order to take a traditional slasher film to new heights. With its immersive sound design and nonlinear approach, the past will catch up with the present in a terrifyingly violent crescendo. Having caught this film at the Fantasia International Film Festival and awarding it a ‘Special Mention’ alongside my fellow jury judging the International Shorts Competition, I am excited to now have this unique film featured on Short of the Week.

Giuliano takes an altogether surreal approach to the aural dimension of the film with the help of sound designer William Tabanou. What we see and what we hear don’t quite align, creating a simple narrative puzzle that neatly fits together all the same. A swarm of summer insects and heavy windmill wings are all that’s heard as the first scene opens to an old red Ford pickup in the middle of a forest clearing tucked away from civilization. As we hear Bach’s “Air on a G String” play from an old radio in the front seat, the voices of a disembodied couple on their romantic day trip fill in the details of what we must have missed. With carefully composed pans across the now vacant environment, Giuliano cleverly forces us to pay attention to the details. While we see the empty truck bed, we can hear what the couple did earlier that day and wonder, for the dozenth time, what happened here? *Spoilers Follow*

“We wanted to make something that was both beautiful and horrific, something that possessed the ability to disturb the audience while simultaneously lulling them into a trance,” explains Giuliano.

When the peacefulness of the prairie is disrupted by the introduction of a killer, violence swells within the phantom soundscape and Giuliano chillingly focuses the camera’s lens toward the more sinister details of the scene: a woman’s lost retainer in the grass, a trail of blood, a body. As the past finally catches up with the present and, as the sun goes down, a woman comes out of her hiding place in the tall grass…the moment is nothing short of terrifying. Giuliano has kept the viewer within such a safe cocoon up until this moment that the reality of the present is absolutely hair-raising. 

Shot over the course of a weekend in the Minnesota countryside, Giuliano and his team’s unconventional short required unorthodoxl crafting. While the first production day resembled normalcy, the second day they recorded all of the audio for the first half of the film and it was anything but. While the actors and props were on location, only the field sound recording team was present. Not having to worry about cameras, it allowed the actors to move freely and perform with abandon. While only half of what was recorded that day was used, the other half was recreated at a soundstage months later. Finally, the third day of production consisted of filming shots of the truck and location without the actors and only his script to guide him. In all, the experience was instructive and eye-opening to Giuliano.

In Sound, We Live Forever also screened at Fantastic Fest, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Morbido Film Fest, Telluride Horror Show, and Buried Alive Film Festival to name a few. The short served as a director’s calling card for Giuliano’s spec script River which Tango Entertainment is set to produce. We look forward to seeing this new horror-thriller in the future!