PopHorror Let's Get Scared
With The Sound, Brendan Devane isn’t just revisiting the heights of suspense—he’s redefining them. Known for his visceral 2020 debut The Canyonlands, Devane returns with a brutal, atmospheric thriller that fuses horror, action, and psychological tension on a sheer vertical stage. Opening in select theaters nationwide—including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and more — The Sound lands on June 27, hitting VOD platforms like Apple, Amazon, and Fandango At Home the same day.
The film follows a team of elite climbers scaling the mythical Forbidden Wall, a peak steeped in mystery and tragedy. What starts as a monumental challenge quickly warps into a fight for survival as the group encounters something far worse than nature’s wrath—an ancient force determined to bury its secrets forever.
Backed by a strong cast featuring Marc Hills, Rachel Finninger,Nicholas Baroudi, Michael J. Chen, Jocelyn Hudon, Christina Kirkman, and William Fichtner, and scored by James Iha of The Smashing Pumpkins, The Sound is poised to leave audiences breathless. We sat down with Devane to talk creative risks, real-life climbing legends, and what it means to blend horror with altitude.
Interview with Brendan Devane, Director of The Sound
PopHorror: So, what inspired you to blend high-altitude climbing with supernatural horror in The Sound? Was there a specific event or legend or personal fear behind that idea?
Brendan Devane: It kind of came together in two separate ideas that I put that I put together independently. One was I thought of a that it might be fun to have a villain that just existed as a sound wave, as opposed to, you know, physical presence or something like that.
The Thing has always been a film that I think is amazing and it scared me tremendously as a little kid. And I’ve always liked that idea of like an unseen alien kind of bouncing around and taking over people’s minds. So, I had that aspect. And then after I watched the awesome documentary Free Soul, I read a review where someone called it the best horror movie they’d ever seen. And they were kind of being serious about it. And then sort of just sent off a light bulb that like, “Oh, that might be just add some extra tension to a film. If, you know, we had a kind of a horror thriller horror set on the side of a big wall rock climb.” So, it kind of came together that way.
PopHorror: And how did you balance realism with horror elements, you know, using real life climbers in the cast? Were they involved in shaping how the climbing scenes were portrayed?
Brendan Devane: Yeah, absolutely.
I’m fortunate enough to have a pretty good climbing background myself. When I was younger, I lived in Colorado and did all sorts of ice climbing and peak bagging, stuff like that. So, I had a pretty good idea how I wanted to do things. And while I’m a big fan of films like Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit, they aren’t really authentic as far as the climbing that they portray. So, it was definitely a goal of mine to portray this climbing accurately.
And it was definitely a balance to try to keep…the climbing the way that it should be while still providing thrills and scares and stuff like that. So, when I don’t want to give too much away, but when someone’s possessed, yeah, they’ll do things that normal people can’t do, like defy gravity and stuff like that. But for the, when you’re not possessed, you have, you know, the rules of rock climbing are firmly in place and there’s nobody doing anything that isn’t actually possible in the real world.
Some Family Drama
PopHorror: And Mark Hills plays a character connected to a previous doomed expedition. How did you work with him to capture the personal legacy and psychological weight of that character?
Brendan Devane: Yeah, because it’s not so apparent when the movie opens that who you see there (who’s actually Adrian Ballinger, world-renowned mountaineer) just came back from summering Everest for the 10th time, is his grandfather, right? And you kind of put that together a little bit after you hear some dialogue.
And it definitely plays into the relationship he has with his father, played by the wonderful Bill Fichtner, and how he’s trying to balance taking risk while still, you know, like all real climbers or extreme sport people do, how they balance their family obligations with the risks that they feel driven to take. And so, you know, working with Mark was great. Mark’s a real rock climber in real life, you know.
And he definitely got the idea right away that, you know, he’s torn. He’s kind of this reluctant hero of wanting to go do something for his family, not necessarily wanting to get dragged into everything that’s happening. But of course he does. And, you know, leads him on his little journey there. Yeah. I like the scenes between, you know, him and his dad sort of almost arguing, but trying to reach a point of agreement.
We really come to terms with what’s going to happen, whatever the outcome…working with Bill once again — what a wonderful actor…Near the end of that that first scene with Bill and Sean, the script was a little bit more detailed about how his dad was trying to convince him not to go, and Bill brought some great notes and some great feelings where…he’s trying to convince him not to go without actually saying, “Look, I don’t want you to go.”
PopHorror: Right.
Brendan Devane: Because, as we all know, when we’re young kids and our parents tell us not to do something, we’re generally going to go do it.
PopHorror: It’s almost like that’s the permission to go and do the thing when like the person tells you: “Don’t do it.”
Brendan Devane: Yeah. So, he’s kind of trying to get across to him that he doesn’t want to go and he tries a couple more times, but it’s more of a subtle attempt without him actually saying, well, we really wish you wouldn’t go. So, it was really fun to work with those scenes with those great actors and try to get a little bit more substance behind the characters than you might not see in a typical lower budget horror film.
Production Facts
PopHorror: How much of the climbing in The Sound was real versus CGI or a soundstage? Were the actors hundreds of feet off the ground and things like that?
Brendan Devane: No. Unless you’re Tom Cruise, SAG doesn’t really let you take up a thousand feet in the air. So it’s…
It’s about half and half, really. So we shot the actors inside a volume stage, an LED volume stage. And so when you see the actors and dialogue, that’s inside a studio, but it’s not green screen or CGI. It’s a volume stage, kind of like how Disney shoots The Mandalorian and stuff like that. So the images are projected on the screens in real time. So the actors can see them. It looks a little bit different, right, when you’re inside the studio than how it comes through on the camera because of frame rates and pixels and stuff like that.
They can see what’s up there. And yeah. So anytime you see the actors or dialogue, that’s in a controlled environment, but we do go outside and obviously show people, you know, on Liberty bell was the climb that they were on. It’s up in Washington state. And yeah, they were 1500 feet in the air. And I used a professional rock climbing filming crew with professional rock climbers to shoot those images.
And, you know, [we] use wardrobe to identify the climbers and stuff like that helmet colors those were all pre-planned and stuff like that, so yeah, it’s about half and half, I would say, between the volume stage and the actors, and the professional rock climbers who were actually a thousand feet in the air.
PopHorror: so the vertical setting was almost like a like [an extra] monster in this movie, in a way…Because there’s always a danger of falling, it’s like an extra monster, you know.
Brendan Devane: Yeah, it’s something that’s…I guess it was in my last film and this film, too, where the natural environment sort of becomes a character or a part of the film.
You don’t want to take away attention from the actors or things that are going on, but it’s nice to have that extra…the wall [the name of the film’s mountain] is an extra villain because it’s a threat that doesn’t go away.
On the flip side of that, part of the challenge with the actors was getting them to not seem like they’re afraid when they’re a thousand feet in the air, because that’s normal day at the office for a professional rock. Yeah. These people aren’t afraid how we would be afraid being stuck in a little shelf a thousand feet in the air. They’re not.
So trying to coach them with being like, “Hey, you guys are fine until you see some weird stuff happening.” That’s going to make you afraid. So, trying to balance those two things out with the actors was important.
What is The Force in The Sound?
PopHorror: And what does the malevolent force represent to you? Is it pure evil, nature’s revenge, or something deeper than that?
Brendan Devane: No, it’s not. I mean, in my mind, it’s not that deep. I really kind of lifted it from The Thing, John Carpenter’s wonderful movie…We never find out what The Thing is. We never know what its motivation is. We never know. We don’t know anything about The Thing, except that it takes over people and makes them explode into gory, gory mess. So that was kind of my inspiration for this is that there’s no real [explanation].
At least in my mind, I didn’t build anything where it had like a purpose or a… kind of origin story. The original story [could be] that’s a space rock that, you know, comes down and it’s an alien. It’s not so much paranormal, you know, it’s not ghost or anything like that. It’s more like an alien presence, but there really isn’t really too much behind it other than it’s there to cause chaos.
PopHorror: Yeah, and in horror sometimes it is best to leave at least some things as a mystery and not give all of the details away. So do you see a possible follow-up to this or like maybe not a franchise, but at least, you know, like a sequel or anything like that? Do you have any other plans movie-wise or anything?
Brendan Devane: Yeah, I don’t necessarily see it as a franchise per se, but there is a sequel script written and it just basically picks up where this one ends off on a little — no pun intended — cliffhanger that’s at the end of the film.
You know, whether or not films get a sequel or not just basically depends on…the business aspect. So hopefully we get to do it. It’s a great story. Shoots in Italy and Norway and Spain and ups the budget…So hopefully we get to do that right now after The Sound releases on June 27th here coming up next week.
We are in pre-production for our next film, which is more of a straight psychological thriller. It’s not really a horror, kind of in the vein of Michael Clayton, that sort of thing, shooting in New Orleans and Chicago. So we’re really excited about that. And people maybe don’t know this, but it takes years to make films, right? I just spent three years of my life on The Sound. And now jumping into the next one takes years as well.
That’s part of being a filmmaker.
PopHorror: Even with a smaller film, you often need to have a lot of things line up to make it happen.
Brendan Devane: Well, yeah, number one is the money, right? One of my favorite old movies is Three Amigos, where Steve Martin says, “No dough, no show.” I’d recommend everybody watch the Three Amigos. It’s a great movie. So hopefully your funding comes through. But even if we have all the money at this level of filmmaking, I’m saying not $100 million Disney Marvel projects, it requires a lot of pre-production, especially The Sound, right? I made two movies at once, a professional rock climbing movie with professional rock climbers and a professional rock climbing crew, and then a studio movie with actors and a studio crew.
This takes time, you know, for pre production. And then we had over 400 VFX shots in this film which isn’t a lot for a Marvel film but for an independent film that that is a lot, and that took months and months and months to get all the ropes and the safety wires out and, you know, the possessed people’s black eyes and stuff like that, that takes time and effort. And so it just ends up being you always think like, oh, yeah, we can shoot this. And I think we shot this film in 17 days minus the second unit. That’s pretty fast, right?
But it actually took, like, two years to make the final product. Also when working, you know, I work with Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound. They tell me when I can do my post-production up there at Skywalker Ranch. So some of the delay in this film was waiting for the opportunity for the sound mix with Lucasfilm because they’re so busy up there, you have to wait until you get your turn. All right.
PopHorror: Well, I guess that should be enough questions and I wish your movie luck.
Brendan Devane: …Thanks. Thanks so much. And once again, it comes out on June 27th in theaters and [wherever] you download your digital entertainment.
