Apart from the occasional Blair Witch Project, scary movies need scary scores. But much like making a genuinely scary movie, composing genuinely scary music becomes more of a challenge all the time. By now, even the most timid moviegoers among us have surely grown inured to the throbbing bass, the tense strings, and all the other standard, increasingly clichéd instrumental techniques used to generate a sense of ominousness. Given the ever-growing pressure to come up with more effectively dread-inducing music, the invention of the Apprehension Engine was surely inevitable. A part of the studio of film composer Mark Korven, it looks unlike any other musical instrument in existence, and sounds even more so.
With a normal instrument, says Korven in the Great Big Story Video above, "you're expecting it to have a sound that is pleasing." But with the Apprehension Engine, "the goal is to just produce sounds that, in this case, are disturbing." What we hear is less music than a sonic approximation of the abyss itself, which somehow emerges from his manipulation of a variety of strings, bars, wheels, and bows attached to a wooden box — as analog a device as one would ever encounter in the 21st century. "I originally commissioned the Apprehension Engine because I was tired of the same digital samples, which resulted in a lot of sameness," says Korven. "I was looking for something more experimental, more acoustic, that would give me a little more of an original sound."
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