Cory Stillman
Awards Radar recently had the chance to speak with re-recording mixers Jamie Hardt and Christina Wen about the latest entry in Ryan Murphy’s Monster series for Netflix – The Ed Gein Story. It’s the most immersive season yet, inviting viewers into Gein’s corrupted headspace, and adopting a more internal view of what makes a serial killer like him tic.
After all, Gein was a latent schizophrenic who grew up in relative isolation. His hallucinations often became his reality, and so Hardt and Wen were given the difficult task of conveying how terrifying real the subjective nature of this experience can become.
“We almost never present Ed’s hallucinations in a dreamy or abstract way, and when we do these sorts of tricks, we pick our moments for maximum impact,” says Hardt. “When do we tip off the audience? How do we keep the tension of not knowing what’s real or not, and then at what point do we interject and break the spell?”
Serial killer shows like Monster have always overwhelmed me with their focus on such unadulterated evil, but The Ed Gein Story demonstrates a crucial curiosity about its subject. And when I asked Hardt and Wen about that balance between disturbing and intriguing the audience, their answer surprised me.
“I think you have to overwhelm the audience,” says Hardt. “I think that was definitely our goal some of the time; some of the imagery and situations are just so heightened, at times, you don’t know what you’re being shown, and we dare you to comprehend it. I think this is necessarily an aspect of the emotional truth of the story, if the story is the deeds of Ed Gein.”
Hardt’s latter point is an important one, as this third season of Monster pursues a thought-provoking line of questioning around true crime and its stranglehold over American pop culture. The Ed Gein Story is so much more than the story of Gein and his crimes. In many ways, it is the story of our violence-obsessed nation today.
Perhaps no sequence captures Gein’s troubling legacy more than in the final episode, where Gein stands alongside the fictional characters based on him, and spins away into the night with his chainsaw. It is a harrowing moment made all the better by the trickery of award-winning sound designers like Hardt and Wen.
“Jamie mixed and auditioned several opera pieces to present to our showrunners and producers,” Wen says of that particular scene. “With each piece of opera, I was automating the volume and perspective of the chainsaw accompanying the opera. Mixing in a team can feel like playing in a band sometimes! And in this case, I got to jam with Jamie playing chainsaws and operas!”
Check out our full conversation with Hardt and Wen below!
Monster: The Ed Gein Story seems to lean heavily on restraint rather than overt sound design. How did you collectively decide when to use silence, subtlety, or minimalism to heighten the psychological tension?
Jamie Hardt: Is that so? To me, this season had the most overt sound design we’ve had on the entire series! It’s not so much loud or full moments versus silence or minimalism, I think. There’s so much intentionality and precision. It doesn’t always scream out at you, sound design, but I think that is to our benefit; it engenders a level of acceptance and credibility with the audience, whereas a show with more obvious design might feel more distant or abstract. I think there’s a balance you have to find in horror between artifice and verisimilitude that you’re spared if the genre is science fiction or action.
It’s such a challenge to create an immersive experience for people viewing through a TV screen in their living room, and I think one of the greatest coups you can achieve mixing television is to make the audience lean in, make them concerned they’re going to miss something if they don’t catch every detail in a critical moment. This is something you accomplish with silence or minimalism, but also silence presented in a bigger context that promises the audience a payoff: minimalism that has details, has story and character relevance, conveys stakes, sound that dares you not to notice.
Christina Wen: I think the most special part of mixing The Ed Gein Story was getting to listen to and work with everyone’s interpretation of the story from the production dialogue edits, sound designs by the sound editorial team led by Gary Megregian, to music composed by Mac Quayle. So when we started working with sonic and musical elements to picture, there were so many emotional and tense moments and elements that it felt natural where the sound design should sit in the mix, in relation to dialogue and the music. Instead of deciding when to use silence vs loudness, it was more of an emotional response for me, and whether the mixing choices I make will make me and other talents in the room feel the emotions I want to convey. By creating space for eeriness and unsettledness, the jarring moments become louder and scarier as well.
Compared to previous seasons of Monster, this chapter feels more internal and subjective. How did that shift influence your approach to the overall mix?
JH: The most important aspect of Ed Gein’s character is his latent schizophrenia. Ed hears and sees things that aren’t real, and he can’t distinguish between his hallucinations and reality. This means that every scene potentially is an internal and subjective one, but one that presents itself as something really happening in the world.
On a straightforward level, this means we might “tip our hand” a lot less than we might otherwise. We almost never present Ed’s hallucinations in a dreamy or abstract way, and when we do these sorts of tricks, we pick our moments for maximum impact: when do we tip off the audience? How do we keep the tension of not knowing what’s real or not, and then at what point do we interject and break the spell?
CW: I think behind Ed Gein’s story, and his struggle with schizophrenia, is loneliness and isolation. Gein grew up on an isolated farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin, where he lived alone after the deaths of all his family members. The internal/subjective feeling to me is reflective of the story of Gein. And, like Jamie mentioned, in the mix we didn’t treat the sounds or conversations related to Gein’s hallucination with heavy design or effects, because to Gein it was his reality. One example of a sound element I tried to use in the mix to create an illusion vs. reality was the creakiness of the house. Winter in Plainfield is windy and cold; it would make sense that a wooden house would creak when the wind is gusting hard outside. At the same time, when Gein is hallucinating his mother still alive, living with him, the creakiness also feels like the presence of another person in the house that’s not real.
When dealing with such disturbing material, how do you ensure the sound supports the emotional truth of the story without overwhelming the audience?
JH: I think you have to overwhelm the audience. I think that was definitely our goal some of the time; some of the imagery and situations are just so heightened, at times, you don’t know what you’re being shown, and we dare you to comprehend it. I think this is necessarily an aspect of the emotional truth of the story, if the story is the deeds of Ed Gein. The subject matter requires a certain boldness. It’s something I like about the show, and it’s something common to many of the projects I’ve collaborated on for Ryan Murphy and his team.
CW: The story of Ed Gein is very overwhelming. And I think the overwhelming story and imagery are another reason certain moments feel extremely heartbreaking without complex sonic design. For instance, in episode 6, when Deputy Frank Worden discovers his mother, Bernice Worden, remains in the barn, we don’t hear him scream as we watch him scream; when it cuts to outside the barn, it’s nearly silent except for Frank’s gut-wrenching scream from inside. Afterwards, as the environmental sounds gradually return, action-packed music builds as Frank’s heavy footsteps charge towards Ed, making the moment of confrontation intense.
Can you point to a scene where your work as re-recording mixers fundamentally shaped the storytelling, even if it isn’t immediately obvious to viewers?
JH: We have this amazing scene in episode 2, “Sick as Your Secrets,” where Ed, after arguing with the apparition of his mother, goes to the local tavern and meets his old friend, the bartender Mary Hogan. After a tense conversation, he goes into the bathroom and returns only to find the entire bar now filled with Nazi soldiers and an oompah band. As he moves into the space, a little bewildered, the sound of music and German voices surrounds him (and us) and he finds one conversation, then back to Mary, who he talks to, and as the interaction takes its final turn, the music has changed and now it’s an eerie German drinking song that hands off into the score as the design builds to the fatal moment.
There are so many crazy beats in this scene! And we were able to present it all as a continuous experience from Ed’s perspective with no break in the emotion or the audience’s aural point-of-view.
CW: I also want to mention that at the beginning of episode 302, we go through Ed’s psychosis, and at the peak of his breakdown, the music and sound effects build to an extremely overwhelming moment. In the mix, we worked really hard on balancing music and sound effects, while still preserving clarity for Ed’s dialogue in the scene. We utilized objects in Dolby Atmos to make certain sound elements directional, and we hoped to really have the audience experience this hallucination from Ed’s point of view. As we snapped out of Ed’s perspective, there was almost no sound at all, and I slowly mixed back in the whistling winter wind and wood creaks of the house to emphasize the overwhelming feeling of going through psychosis. The sound of the wood creaking in the house, as well as the wind blowing from outside, really enhances the feeling of loneliness and paranoia.
How did your collaboration evolve over the course of the season, and how do your individual sensibilities complement each other in the final mix?
JH: This is the first time Christina and I have worked together, and honestly, I think we had our process worked out within hours. We clicked very quickly, which was very important. From the first shot, the show is a dance for sound design, music, and dialogue. When we play down episodes, I’d generally have a couple of notes for Christina, and she’d have a few for me. We were fortunate to have a pretty free schedule on this show, so we had a lot of opportunities to just play episodes, take notes, try things, and pick out creative targets of opportunity. Our schedule allocated five days to complete each of the eight episodes, including days for playbacks, and then extra time at the end for some additional notes passes with our clients, and a theatrical mix of the first episode for the premiere, among other delivery odds and ends.
Mixing with a partner is unlike any other kind of relationship in post: so much is unsaid, and you pick up on your partner’s sensibility, and this comes with experience working together, but also just listening carefully and not intruding too much on what they’re doing. You can just let the console speak for you, and if the other person is tuned in, they’ll pick up what you’re throwing down. And then they might have an idea you didn’t.
At first, Christina and I were chatty, but very quickly we were in the zone. By this I mean, you don’t really talk to each other about 90% of the decisions you’re making. Most of the conversations we’re having are very peculiar to people sitting behind the credenza: you both zero-in on a hand pat that’s flamming on the dialogue track and you isolate it, or the music’s low-end is sitting on an impact in the effects. You don’t even need to say what you’re adjusting; the other person just picks up on it.
We had a lot of fun on this mix. Once it was clear how accomplished and confident Christina was, it couldn’t have gone any other way.
CW: The best part about mixing The Ed Gein Story was getting to collaborate and try different things in the mix with Jamie. Both Jamie and our sound supervisor, Gary, are from the Midwest, so I got to learn so much about the sonic environments and culture of the Midwest from working together, which reflected in how I approached the background soundscape in the mix. Creating sound for film and TV requires so much collaboration, and working within different teams is always a learning curve at first, which is also my favorite part about being a mixer. And from communicating with Jamie well from the start of the series, since this was our first time mixing together, we got to create a workflow that worked really smoothly throughout the whole mix.
And when talking about mixing collaboration, I often think back to the series finale, where Ed Gein, among the fictional characters based on him, spins away into the night with his chainsaw. Jamie mixed/auditioned several opera pieces to present to our showrunners and producers. With each piece of opera, I was automating the volume and perspective of the chainsaw accompanying the opera. Mixing in a team can feel like playing in a band sometimes! And in this case, I got to jam with Jamie playing chainsaws and operas!
What do you feel makes the sound of The Ed Gein Story distinctive within the television landscape?
JH: The show takes us to so many different places, across decades of American history, though the core we hope people connect with is the story and the characters. The show has so much more emotion than anything I’ve worked on in some time, and is so unflinching; we hope the sound supports that.
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