Behind the scenes: Undertone

IBC

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While looking after his dying parents, VR filmmaker Ian Tuason became obsessed with demonic possession stories which planted the seed for the uniquely creepy sound design of his first feature.

You won’t hear Baa Baa Black Sheep in quite the same way after seeing Undertone, the latest twist on found horror which emphasises sconic scares over visual gore. Like last year’s low budget breakout chiller Good Boy, Undertone preys on audience fears by letting their imagination run riot about what might lurk in the shadows.

“Sometimes the most terrifying thing of all is our imagination, and what we project onto something that may or may not be there,” says Canadian writer-director Ian Tuason. “This is a found audio movie and a soundscape above all else. I created a sound design for this story where everything is directional. The audience can close their eyes and feel where everything is — or might be. When something far away is suddenly  getting closer behind you, the terror becomes heightened and amplified.”

The story takes place in one small house and is told through the point of view of one woman nursing her dying mother who is bedridden upstairs. The woman is Evy (Nina Kiri), who is also co-hosts a podcast investigating paranormal activity. Evy is a sceptic when it comes to unexplained things that go bump in the night. You might be able to join the dots.

“I always considered my mother’s company as the safest place I could be, and when I saw her in this vulnerable, dependent condition at the end of her life, my imagination took off,” says Tuason. “A possession movie where you’re caregiving for a parent and they become possessed by demonic forces was something that I hadn’t seen before.”

The soundscape

Tuason knew the sound for the movie was going to do 80 percent of the lifting in terms  of the storytelling. Having experimented shooting live-action shorts with a 360-degree camera he wanted to duplicate the immersive effect of those visuals in the sound design of his feature debut.

“I thought as much about the aural elements of undertone as I did the visual elements you see on camera,” he says. “The intention was to create a soundscape of increasing force and menace.”

Tuason wrote audio directions and camera directions and into the script. “The script would indicate that a baby cries behind you, or we hear from right to left the tumbling of a body downstairs,” says Tuason.

Othe background sounds like stairs creaking or the ticking of a clock are amplified. Like A Quiet Place (2018) the sound of silence is also threatening. The atmosphere becomes more intimate when Evy puts on noise-cancelling headphones to listen to audio clips for her podcast. The noise-cancelling headphones also mean she can’t hear what may be going on around her.

“A lot of the horrifying elements in the movie are intensified because you, as the viewer, are trying to create images of what Evy is listening to through her headphones.”

He employs audio apophenia, the phenomenon of hearing hidden messages in songs when they are played backwards.

“Audio apophenia is trying to make sense of a random sound that’s played in a different  context, which becomes scary, because the listener is creating the horror in their own mind,” says Tuason.

One of these is subverts the innocuous nursery rhyme, a tune chosen because it is public domain and therefore free of rights.

The film’s supporting characters, including medical professionals, Evy’s boyfriend, podcast listeners phoning into the show, and a married couple on the audio files, all appear off-camera, requiring actors who were skilled with voice-over work.

Except for the audio files, recorded and designed by Dane Kelly prior to production, the sound design in undertone was completed in post. A surround-sound mix was later expanded into Dolby Atmos.

Another similarity with Good Boy is the ingenuity forced on the filmmakers by the low production budget. Tuason wrote and filmed the entire story in the small two storey house he grew up in Toronto, the same one where he had nursed his parents in their dying days.

Over the two and a half years of preparation and writing he took hundreds of photographs which he turned over to production designer Mercedes Coyle to transform the non-descript decor into something a little more chilling in its banality.

This included sourcing and positioning religious iconography like ceramic statues, crosses, and paintings of Jesus and Mary and creepy childhood drawings (based on the scribblings of Tuason’s young nephew).

Director of photography Graham Beasley filmed on Alexa Mini LF partly because its small size was useful for getting into tight corners and stairwells, and for capturing Evy’s claustrophobic mindset. Beasley frames more for what we don’t see than what we do, allowing our fears to fill in the gaps.

His lighting scheme begins with an emphasis on daylight but gradually turns to darkness — a neat metaphor for the dying of the light. The upstairs of the home set it lit in a cold manner, suggestive of hospital lighting, while the downstairs feels more nurturing.

Background in VR filmmaking

Tuason began his career making 360-degree virtual reality-inspired horror shorts on YouTube, including Continuity Problems (2009) and Extreme Close Up (2011). In 2014 he set up his own VR production company DimensionGate pioneering immersive 3D sound for live-action cinematic content for headsets like Meta Quest. His 2015 live-action 360-degree  horror short 3:00am racked up 9 million views on YouTube after being shared by Ashton Kutcher and Lil Wayne.

Following that viral success, Tuason was hired to make VR content for clients including Warner Brothers, The Canadian Football League, The Chainsmokers and Snoop Dogg. In 2024 DimensionGate released VR game Stab It in which you have to stab bats in a cave to survive.

Undertone began life as a radio play in 2018 about paranormal investigators who stumble upon some sinister audio footage.  The project was inspired by user-generated horror memes and myths distributed online (dubbed Creepypastas) which are often presented as first-person accounts or faux-found footage. For his radio play Tuason explored an internet phenomenon in which paranormal enthusiasts record themselves listening to songs played backward.

He then digitally reversed tracks, filmed the actors as they listened, and captured the distorted audio himself on an iPhone. “I discovered these YouTube channels of people examining songs in reverse, searching for hidden messages… and knew I wanted to write about sitting alone in the dark at night looking and listening.”

One particular ‘creepypasta’ that stuck with Tuason was the Elisa Lam story, in which a young woman vanished while staying in a dilapidated hotel in downtown Los Angeles. In the aftermath of her disappearance, hundreds of armchair sleuths pored through security-cam footage of Lam’s apparent spectral presence in the hotel’s corridors and elevators with some speculating she’d fallen victim to the videotape malevolence of 1998 Japanese horror The Ring.

The feature only took shape when, during Covid in 2020, Tuason found himself tending to both of his parents who each had a terminal cancer diagnosis.

“It’s easy to lose faith when you watch your parents dying,” says Tuason. “This was a very personal story. Evy was me. Everything that ended up on the screen, or in the speakers of Evy’s headphones, was intentional and honest, and meticulously thought out.”

Tuason wears the influences of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity on his sleeve. Having sold the rights to Undertone to A24 for a seven-figure sum, rival horror house Blumhouse hired him to direct a reboot of Paranormal Activity which is scheduled for a May 2027 at Paramount Pictures.