Hearing the haunts of Hill House from Nugen Audio

Re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales utilised Halo Upmix to create the emotions and suspense in The Haunting of Hill House

As a re-recording mixer mixing at post-production sound company Formosa NoHo, Jonathan Wales completed the audio mix for a Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House, using Nugen Audio’s Halo Upmix.

Premiering on Netflix on October 12, The Haunting of Hill House is a 10-episode series that reimagines Shirley Jackson’s horror novel of the same name. For this project, Wales relied on the Halo Upmix to convert the emotions of haunted memories as Hill House’s story flashes between the past and present.

Wales explained: “One of the episodes featured scenes that were 15 minutes long in one single shot. We wanted to be able to follow the perspectives of the actors through this giant journey of directing and acting. It was amazing to see it all come together, and the differences in spaciousness between the house in the past and the funeral parlour in the present.”

The Haunting of Hill House was mixed in Dolby Atmos. With a need to convert “the feeling of spaciousness while creating unnerving suspense” throughout the mix, Wales required a solution that allows immersive output with existing tools. He then decided to take up Audio Ease’s Altiverb 5.1 and Avid ReVibe outputs, and sent them through Halo Upmix.

“I owe a lot of what we were able to achieve with ambiences and reverbs to Halo Upmix. There is a lot of content over what the Halo Upmix algorithm is doing at any point in time, so it really became an integral part of the workflow for mixing the show,” he concluded.