In the last moments of Widow’s BayIn the episode “What to Expect on Your Trip,” Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), high on mushrooms, is thrown over the toilet, his hands clasped in prayer as a deep, menacing voice calls out to him and images of his wife, then pregnant, flash through his mind. “He’s making this earnest call to God [to protect his son] “Then we meet this subterranean, demonic spiritual voice that is the voice of the island itself,” explains supervising sound editor Matt Yoakum, describing the sound he and his team spent the most time on in the series, “the big bad of the whole show.”
He adds: “We don’t know exactly what he’s saying, but he’s talking to him and you haven’t heard anything like that on the show until this moment.”
Showrunner Katie Dippold, director Andrew de Jong, and cinematographer Christian Springer chose to center sound rather than rely on the usual visual tropes of a psychedelic experience when Tom drinks a mushroom concoction called “true sight” to find answers about the supernatural force the locals believe inhabits the fictional New England island town. That meant exaggerating sounds like the creaking of a chair and intensifying other sounds, like a long drag on a cigarette, which “added a comedic effect,” says re-recording mixer Larry Benjamin.
“The voice was central to building our character’s world to put us in the head of what he was experiencing, and it ends up going from a place of it being kind of a psychological distortion and ultimately collapsing to a specific place that relates to his character arc and building the story,” Yoakum adds of the unfolding mystery.
This story first appeared in the June standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To obtain the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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