Inside ‘Widow’s Bay’s’ Creepiest Sound Cue: The Voice of the Island

In the final moments of Widow’s Bay‘s “What to Expect on Your Trip” episode, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), high on mushrooms, is hurled over the toilet, hands clasped in prayer as a deep, haunting sound calls to him and images of his wife, then pregnant, flash in his mind. “He’s doing this earnest plea to God [to protect his son] and then we get met with this subterranean, demonic spiritual voice that is representative of the voice of the island itself,” explains supervising sound editor Matt Yocum, describing the voice, on which he and his team spent the most time in the series, as the “big bad of the whole show.”

“We don’t know exactly what it’s saying, but it speaks to him and you haven’t heard anything like that in the show up to this point,” he adds.

Showrunner Katie Dippold, director Andrew DeYoung and cinematographer Christian Sprenger chose to center sound rather than lean into the usual visual tropes of a psychedelic experience when Tom drinks a shroom concoction called “true sight” to find answers about the supernatural force locals believe inhabits the fictional New England island town. That meant exaggerating noises like the creak of a chair and intensifying other sounds, such as a long drag on a cigarette, which “added a comedic effect,” says rerecording mixer Larry Benjamin.

Adds Yocum of the mystery that starts to unfold: “Audio was the focus of our character’s world-building to put us in the head of what he was experiencing, and it ends up going from a place of being sort of psychological distortion and eventually unraveling to a specific place that relates to his character arc and story-building.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.