Jonathan Wales Immerses Horror Film Audiences

When it comes to horror films, production teams work hard to find new approaches to scare audiences.

Today, with Dolby Atmos and immersive sound growing in popularity, there are even more ways to give viewers a fright. That's exactly what Re-recording Mixer Jonathan Wales accomplishes for the horror shows and films on which he works, both as a freelancer and for Warner Brothers Studios.

Wales didn't set out to specialise in horror, but a 30-year-long career path brought him there. "I tend to work on a lot of horror movies," he said. "It wasn't supposed to be that way, but when you start doing something well, people notice, and you end up doing more of it. It was an accidental career path, but it’s a fun genre to work in. Right now, there's probably an even amount of time spent between original series content and horror films and shows."

Among Wales' most notable mixing projects are Netflix projects like 'Haunting of Hill House', 'Midnight Mass' and 'Fall of the House of Usher'. His feature-length film credits include 'Insidious', 'The Red Door' and 'The Black Phone'. When he's not working on re-recording projects, Wales is also a scoring mixer and is credited with mixing the score for every Mike Flanagan project, from the first episode of 'Haunting of Hill House' in 2018, forward.

Wales said he has also seen a change in the way directors and producers attack horror projects. "Over the past five to 10 years, there has been an increasing trend towards mixing in Atmos as the primary format," he explained. "That effectively requires us to have solutions that handle a lot of detailed format conversions like upmixing and downmixing, while simultaneously managing level specs. That’s how I've come to grow my relationship with NUGEN Audio."

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