This episode originally aired on Every Little Thing.

For nearly half a century, one eerie sound has been showing up again and again in movies and TV shows. It’s typically used when something spooky or mysterious happens—and it can be heard in Poltergeist, The Matrix, Let the Right One In, and countless episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. So where did this strange sound come from, and how did it spread across Hollywood? This story comes from the podcast Every Little Thing.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original music by Wesley Slover
The Escape Plan Activated by Grant Newman
Tannhäuser Gate by Makeup & Vanity Set
Deviate by Sound of Picture

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

When it comes to sound effects in movies and television, there’s one category that I spend a lot of time thinking about. It’s what I like to call cerebral sound design. Unlike traditional sound effects which may be tied to something you see on screen, cerebral sounds help to nudge you emotionally. They’re kind of like a gray area between sound effects & music. For example, if you’re watching a movie trailer and you hear a booj [music out into booj sfx] then you know something epic is about to happen.

[music in]

Nick (with a trailer voice): In a world of generic CGI blockbusters, [sfx: booj] one trailer sound gets butts into seats [sfx: booj] every time.

[sfx: epic music moment, then fade under]

Now, this sort of sound design is really obvious in trailers. But there’s one genre that wouldn’t be the same without these types of sounds: reality TV. In reality shows, they use these sounds all the time to add some drama to the dialogue.

For instance, there’s a harsh-sounding bowed cymbal [sfx]. Here it is on Survivor:

[sfx clip: Survivor - Dreamz, you have the immunity necklace. It is yours to keep, [sfx] or to assign to anyone else you want.]

There’s also the reverse cymbal [sfx] and lots of different types of hits [sfx: three different hits]. Here’s a clip from the show Love is Blind. In it, you’ll hear a reverse cymbal going into a low hit, followed by a few thumping heartbeats.

[sfx clip: Love is Blind - It would be selfish of me to marry you today. Knowing as much as you tell me that you’re ready, I see that you’re not [sfx].]

Pretty dramatic, right?

[music in]

And there’s one other cerebral sound effect that I can almost guarantee you’ve heard. It gets used constantly, despite how bizarre it sounds. You’ll usually hear it when something spooky or mysterious happens. And this sound has been haunting Hollywood for over 50 years [sfx: waterphone].

[music out]

[sfx: phone ringing]

This story comes from one of my favorite podcasts. It’s called Every Little Thing, which is hosted by Flora Lichtman.

[sfx: phone goes to voicemail: “Leave a message after the tone” - Beep]

Marianna: Hi, Flora. This is Mariana. I've been watching old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, and there's this weird sound in it. That's just kind of chilly. I just really want to know why is this so spooky, and what the heck kind of instrument is making it? I hope you know the answer to this or you know people who know it.

[sfx: phone ring]

Marianna: Hello?

Flora: Hey, this is Flora from Every Little Thing calling you back about this spooky sound effect.

Marianna: Hey.

Flora: I'm also hearing a sound effect in the background.

Marianna: Yeah, so I have a baby, she's about five months old and she just ate and she was in such a good mood and now she has hiccups. And so that's kind of the soundtrack of my life right now, is these little hiccups.

Flora: Do you want to play her the spooky sound you called about to see if we can scare them out of her?

Marianna: I'm not into torturing, but…

Flora: What's her name?

Marianna: Her name is Suzette and we call her Susie.

Flora: Okay, great. Well maybe I'll ask her a question here and there.

Marianna: Okay.

Flora: Ok. Mariana, you called about a sound that you heard on Unsolved Mysteries. So we began our investigation with the primary source.

[sfx clip: Unsolved Mysteries - Was it an extraordinary UFO event? Judge for yourself [sfx: waterphone].]

Flora: Okay. Let me play it for you one more time.

[sfx: waterphone]

Marianna: Yeah, that's my sound.

Flora: It does give a particular vibe. I mean, we tried mocking up that same scene with another classic sound effect. Let's just see if you can hear the difference.

Marianna: Okay?

Flora: Okay. So it's going to be subtle though. You got to listen carefully.

Marianna: Okay. I can do that.

Flora: Okay. Here it goes.

[sfx clip: Unsolved Mysteries - Was it an extraordinary UFO event? Judge for yourself [sfx: cartoon horn & splat sound].

Marianna: That was alarming, but in a totally different kind of way, more like “jump out of your skin” scary.

Flora: Like clown scary?

Marianna: Yes, like clown scary, exactly. Like there's just a clown behind me with one of those squeeze tube, bugle things.

Flora: So Mariana, here's the thing. This sound, [sfx: waterphone] didn't just haunt Unsolved Mysteries like ghosts. This sound is actually everywhere.

Marianna: Oh, okay.

Flora: It was in Star Trek.

[sfx clip: Star Trek - “This device serves no purpose” [sfx: waterphone].]

Flora: The Matrix.

[sfx clip: The Matrix - music + waterphone sfx]

Marianna: Really?

Flora: Back to the Future. Batman.

Marianna: I think I've heard of a few of these art house productions.

Flora: Chinatown, Poltergeist, Dick Traci, Alien, Jurassic Park.

[sfx clip: Jurassic Park - “Containing the fossilized remains of a prehistoric mosquito” [sfx: waterphone].]

Flora: The usual suspects: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Black Hawk Down, Let The Right One In, X-Files, True Blood, Lost Mummy Returns, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, A Christmas Carol, Hugo, and a whole series of movies about hobbits fighting over jewelry.

[sfx clip: The Lord of the Rings - Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, full of worms and oozy smell. This was a hobbit hole and that means good food, a warm bath…]

Marianna: So, are you going to tell me how they make it or are we just going to...

Flora: Wow.

Marianna: I'm impatient. Sorry. I'm so excited about it.

Flora: Okay. Mariana, what do you want to know?

Marianna: It just doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard. And I don't understand what kind of instrument are they using to make this terrible sound?

Flora: Okay. This sound comes from an instrument called a waterphone.

Marianna: A waterphone?

Flora: A waterphone.

Marianna: A phone that is electrified and it is in a bucket of water or something? Maybe that's too on the nose, but...

Flora: I just sent you a picture

Marianna: Oh, here we go. Okay, so it's like a pipe with a bunch of other pipes. I mean, I think if I found this on the street, I would think it was some kind of weird street art.

Flora: So the waterphone is made up of two metal salad bowls welded together with tines sticking up around the sides. It's like the salad bowl is wearing a crown.

Marianna: But how does the sound actually come out?

Flora: You put water in the salad bowl center and then you play it by hitting with a mallet or running a bow against the tides.

Marianna: Okay. How old is this thing? Is this an ancient type of instrument or is this a newer creation?

Flora: I love that you think it's ancient, because it does look that way. We found someone who can resolve this mystery for you. Her name is Rayme.

Marianna: Okay, Rayme.

Rayme: The waterphone was invented in a chicken coop turned welding shed in my backyard.

Flora: Rayme's dad, Richard Waters invented the waterphone in 1968. He was an artist and a musician. He passed away a couple years ago, but Rayme says, this is how you should picture the waterphone's birthplace.

Rayme: Imagine you're in an indoor junkyard. Like misc scrap metal everywhere, bits and pieces of rubber and string and rope. And he had the guts of a piano in there, just standing up against a wall and you could kind of play it just like a harp almost, you could pick up the strings.

Flora: Now, picture Richard Waters a little over 30 years old, brown hair with a beard welding salad bowls together.

Rayme: He would just sort of slap on a pair of glasses because it can injure your eyes. So he did do that and a leather vest and then he would just weld out on this overhang.

Flora: He's like, "My arms are fine."

Rayme: Yeah I mean, and for the most part they were.

Flora: So I'm picturing him in just a leather vest and-

Rayme: Jeans, pants, for sure.

Marianna: Okay. I have the picture. I got it.

Flora: Please hold that image in your mind because these are the fertile conditions from which this sound sprung [sfx: waterphone].

Rayme: He just sort of refined it over the years. And by the end he had a TIG welder and was engraving his name into them, like a signed piece.

Flora: Why did he invent this?

Rayme: I don't know. I think he saw it as an artistic endeavor.

Flora: From what Rayme says, making money from the waterphone was not her dad's priority.

Rayme: That just wasn't his interest. If he had 18 waterphone orders, but he felt like going to the beach that day, he just went to the beach. He just didn't care.

Marianna: It's weird that someone who basically didn't seem to be all that interested in business, managed to parlay this instrument, this weird instrument into something that now we've all heard. How did he manage that?

Flora: I think Susie really wants to know.

Marianna: I know, she does. She's like, "Why are you making me wait so long, Flora?"

Flora: Susie, I asked Rayme that very question. So how did the waterphone go from your backyard to being used across Hollywood productions?

Rayme: I think it was word of mouth. I mean, there has to be a patient zero, but I do not know who it was.

But Flora did manage to find patient zero. It turns out, he’s a legendary percussionist who managed to get the waterphone into tons of movies. Now he’s in his 80s, but he still has his original waterphone. And he agreed to give Flora an exclusive performance. That’s coming up after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[sfx: waterphone sounds in]

The waterphone is a strange instrument that was created in the late 60s by an artist named Richard Waters. Since then, it’s been used in countless movies and TV shows, often when something spooky or mysterious happens.

[sfx: final waterphone sound]

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there’s a waterphone in the scene where the crew investigates a strange, sentient craft.

[sfx clip: Star Trek]

In Poltergeist, you can hear a waterphone while the little girl stares at the haunted, flickering television.

[sfx clip: Poltergeist]

Richard Waters was obviously very talented, but he wasn’t really interested in being a salesman. So the waterphone might have never caught on, if it wasn’t for a famous percussionist who fell in love with it.

Emil Richards: Hey.

Flora: Hi.

Emil Richards: Come in.

Flora: I'm Flora.

Emil Richards: Come on in.

Flora: Thank you for having me. Meet Emil Richards, an 86-year-old percussionist who lives in LA. His house is right between Warner Brothers and Universal Studios. And in film scoring circles, he is a celebrity. In fact, when I walked in, there was an entourage of young musicians sitting on his living room couches. Hi, sorry to interrupt your visit.

Emil’s Guests: “Don't worry about it, do what you got to do.”

Flora: So you know why I'm here?

Emil Richards: I know why you're here.

Flora: The waterphone.

Emil Richards: I know.

Flora: Emil has played music with George Harrison, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Charles Mingas, Perry Commo, Judy Garland. And he's worked on more than 2,000 movie scores.

Marianna: Holy mackerel!

Flora: He's a living legend or in his words, a freak.

Emil Richards: I was the freak at the time. The main freak.

Marianna: (Laughs)

Flora: When I talked to Emil, he dropped the freak bomb 11 times in 24 minutes.

Marianna: Oh wow, OK

Emil Richards: But most percussionists are freaks, with sound, anyway.

Flora: Were you always a sound freak?

Emil Richards: I'd probably started seven years old. I used to get thrown out of hardware stores.

Flora: What would you do?

Emil Richards: Bang, two pieces of metal together, just trying to come up with a different sound that I hadn't heard before. It was annoying to people in the..... going to a hardware store, looking for drywall or something. After a while they'd say, "Get out of here. What is that? You're making too much noise. Get out of here."

Flora: And once a freak, always a freak. As an adult, Emil traveled the world, collecting instruments that made different sounds he hadn't heard before.

Emil Richards: Every time I came back from a trip, my phone would ring off the hook. Composers say, "What's new? I got to have the first use of it." That happened all the time.

Flora: Emil became the go-to person in Hollywood for new and interesting sounds and someone who knew Richard Waters told Emil he had to hear the waterphone.

Emil Richards: When I first heard it, I thought it was pretty interesting, pretty strange. And being the sound freak that I was, I had to have one.

Flora: What was it about this instrument that you said-

Emil Richards: Well, what do you think?

Flora: You tell me.

Emil Richards: No, you tell me.

Flora: You're the expert.

Emil Richards: What do you think of the sound?

Flora: I think it's wild.

Emil Richards: Okay. That's what I thought. And I knew that it would enhance all the percussionist's ammunition to show composers and to work with.

Flora: This is how we go from patient zero to waterphone pandemic. Emil showed it off. Composers heard its weird spooky sound and in Emil's words...

Emil Richards: They all freaked.

Flora: He still has his waterphone.

Marianna: Let me hear it.

Emil Richards: Okay. So if you put some water in...

Flora: He took it to the kitchen sink, turned on the tap, filled it up and played it for you.

Emil Richards: This is what it sounds like [sfx].

Flora: That's with the mallet.

Marianna: Do you know the first time it was in a movie?

Flora: Yes, it was 1971. And the movie was called the Hellstrom Chronicle.

Emil Richards: It was a documentary and I think it was on bugs.

Flora: And I just wanted to get a taste of the movie. I'm sending you a link.

Marianna: Okay. I see these... Oh my God, is that a snake? I'm not sure what that is. It's either a snake or millions of ants. It's ants.

[sfx clip: Hellstrom Chronicle - “They're called Siafu, the driver ant, a mindless unstoppable killing machine dedicated to…”]

Emil Richards: There was just some strange stuff. It was very strange footage. And this instrument worked really well.

[sfx clip: Hellstrom Chronicle - “Driven forward through the darkness by a single demanding need within, the need to kill and plunder.”]

Marianna: Oh my God, they're building an ant made bridge. They're on these rocks. Okay, I need to pause this.

Flora: Yeah, pause.

Marianna: It's really gross. Pause. I'm going to focus back on you.

Flora: Yes. Focus because that insect documentary was just the beginning. From there, the waterphone spread across IMDB like a swarm of ants.

Marianna: Can we go back to Unsolved Mysteries? How did it end up in Unsolved Mysteries?

Gary: Okay, wow...

Flora: You're in luck, Marianna. There is a person who can tell us how this strange and specific instrument ended up on this strange and specific show.

Gary: I was laughing at how, what a narrow subject. This is. It's like, "Will I be able to-"

Flora: This is Gary Malkin. He scored Unsolved Mysteries for 14 years. Gary, thank you for scaring me as a child.

Gary: (Laughs) Oh my God. Well, it's payback, because I used to get scared by the guy who did Perry Mason in the '60s, [sfx] the trill and then dada and then it stopped, [sfx] that. And it was so..[sfx: waterphone]. Pardon me, I shouldn't say that. It was so startling.

Marianna: I, I would have to agree.

Flora: So Gary wanted to startle the [sfx: waterphone] out of his own audience, but instead of using trailing violin stabs, he had another tool.

Gary: The waterphone was a prime example of the kind of thing we did to establish that there was something foreboding and unknown and unexplainable that was coming into the scene and nothing could do it better these kinds of sounds.

Flora: So Mariana, do you have a theory about why the waterphone is creepy? What it is about that sound that makes it work?

Marianna: I bet it works because it's not something that any of us have ever heard. It's not something that we can say, "Oh, that's just a violin. Don't worry about it." Because it's not anything you learned about in music class.

Flora: That's actually very close to Gary's theory.

Gary: A lot of what makes things chilling and scary, and a lot of the reasons why the waterphone has been so effective is it can go between all the lines of the scale that we've determined in Western music that has, the 12 tones. So we go C D E F G A B C is the normal Diatonic scale.

Flora: And most Western music is based around those notes.

Gary: So the waterphone has the spectrum of sound and floats through it quite freely.

Flora: The waterphone doesn't stick to the scale that most people are used to.

Gary: When you alter that just right out the gate, you're dealing with something that frightens people because it's so out of their context. It's so out of their context of understanding of what that is, right. And that's one of the things that scares the [sfx: waterphone] out of people.

Flora: If you listen to Unsolved Mysteries and you were accustomed to atonal music, would it be just like a happy show, not scary at all, a sitcom?

Gary: That's a great question. I love that. Well in a way now it's so retro that it is funny.

In 2020, Netflix rebooted Unsolved Mysteries. In the new version, there are lots of spooky sound design moments, like this. [sfx clip: Unsolved Mysteries - Spooky hit]

And some of them definitely have that atonal waterphone vibe.

[sfx clip: Unsolved Mysteries - Atonal]

There are lots of layers in that sound, and it’s pretty hard to tell if there’s an actual waterphone, or just some kind of dissonant synthesizer. Either way, it’s clear that the spine-tingling sounds of the waterphone have inspired a whole generation of composers and sound designers. So why does it work so well? Gary has a theory…

Gary: I think it has something to do with our relationship to suffering and the human voice, right? So the ultimate, and in some ways, very easy way to get people afraid is to move into a sound texture that imitates a level of [sfx: ghostly moaning] groaning, of sobbing, of moaning, of haunting, of “aaaahhh! [sfx: aaahhh moaning].” The waterphone is another expression of the cry.

[sfx: waterphone sounds]

Gary: And by the way, I've never said these words before, so I'm totally extemporizing but it makes sense to me, that sound that we are most afraid of are the sounds of grief and loss because most people are terrified of death, loss and illness. And these sounds remind us of the things we most are afraid of. It's my theory. And I never said it before this moment, so there.

[music in]

Marianna: You know what it reminds me of a little bit, also, is like sad sounds that either babies make, or the weird creepy sound that cats make like, "Meow."

Flora: The low Meow.

Marianna: Yeah, [sfx: meow] exactly.

Flora: Is there a cat in the background right now? Is there a cat meowing on cue?

Marianna: We thought that she'd be quieter if I put her away, and that has not worked out very well.

[sfx: waterphone sound]

Flora: So what do you think? Mystery un-unsolved?

Marianna: Yeah, definitely mystery un-unsolved. I actually think the sound feels less scary now to me, I'll have to see when I watch Unsolved Mysteries again.

[music transition into credits track: Makeup & Vanity Set: Tannhäuser Gate]

That story came from the podcast Every Little Thing. Every week on the show, they answer listener questions like: Why do auctioneers talk the way they do? Is it weird to be nice to Alexa? And how did baseball games and organ music first get teamed up? To learn the answers, subscribe to Every Little Thing on Spotify.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To hear some of the work our team does outside of this podcast, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram.

Every Little Thing is produced by Aaron Reese, Phoebe Flanigan, Annette Heist, and Flora Lichtman, with help from Nicole Paka and Doug Barron. Our consulting editors are Caitlin Kenny and Jorge Just. Scored by Dara Hirsch and Bobby Lord. Mixed by Dara Hersh. Special thanks to Brooks Hubbert.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]