Come March 7, Resul Pookutty, the Oscar-winning sound designer, brings his expertise to Malayalam film Vadakkan, a supernatural thriller deeply rooted in Indian folklore.
The film has already gained international recognition at the Global Film Festival, setting high expectations for its eerie yet immersive storytelling. In an exclusive interview with MoneyControl.com, Pookutty shares his long-standing connection with the film, revealing how he was initially involved in its production before eventually shaping its haunting soundscape.
Unlike conventional horror films that rely on sudden, loud jump scares, Vadakkan takes a more nuanced approach to sound. Pookutty discusses his use of ambisonic design, infrasound frequencies, and AI-driven sound technologies to create an unsettling atmosphere that lingers beyond the film’s runtime. Drawing inspiration from real paranormal recordings and Kerala’s rich folk traditions, he ensures that the horror in Vadakkan feels deeply personal and emotionally driven rather than just shocking. As AI continues to transform sound design, Pookutty remains optimistic about its potential, yet firmly believes that human creativity and intuition remain irreplaceable.
Excerpts from the interview:
Vadakkan has already received acclaim at the Global Film Festival. What drew you to this supernatural thriller and how did you approach designing its soundscape?
Vadakkan has been with me for many years. Initially, me and Sajeed were working together. I was trying to produce the film, put it together, find the actors and the people who I wanted in the project. That didn't work out. So it was in limbo and then many things happened. So I have always been in the film right from its conceptual beginning. And I always knew that it was a very potential film. Because it is very rooted in tradition. It's a very believable story. And it's also very youthful in its presence. A film like this, which is more in the horror space, in the supernatural thriller space, as a genre it's always been liked and loved in Indian cinema. I hope the same thing continues with this film also.
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The film’s first-look poster is described as "talking to the audience." How did you enhance that immersive experience through sound?
Sound is always immersive. You do sound so that the audience gets drawn into the picture. So always our attempt is to create an immersive experience for the audience to come in and experience something like that. And especially a film like this has a lot of ambisonic designs. There are things that we have tried in this film, probably people don't hear but they experience. So it's been quite a novel approach. It's not like, 'Okay, there's a horror film, you have to scare people. So you do the sound like that.' It has never been that. I never believed in that aspect of sound. When you say horror films, you have to scare people. Scare is an experience. It's an emotion that you go through. It's like laughter, it's like the cry. You don't want to be in that situation. For me, scare is that. It is not something that, you know, scares somebody. For me it's not that. It's not a momentary experience. For me, it's a longer experience. That me as an audience, I don't want to be in the situation. Or I don't want to see my loved ones getting caught in a situation like that. So scare is worked out like that in this film. It is not like you put a big sound and people get scared. That's what you regularly do in a film of this kind. But we stayed away from doing that.
Horror relies heavily on sound to build tension. What unique techniques or technologies did you use in Vadakkan to create a truly spine-chilling atmosphere?
From a film like Vadakkan which is basically in the supernatural thriller genre, people expect a lot of sound and we are going to create situations where people get scared. For me, in this film, it is not a momentary experience. For me, it is somebody going through a situation over a period of time, and that stays with you.
I am a person who uses technology every day for my work, for my living. So I do rely on many things. I have used a lot of new AI tools and other tools, sound design tools, to create that kind of atmosphere.
More than that, many sequences in the film are designed in a way that you do not hear many sounds that I have used in the film. You hear, I mean, you experience it. There is something called the usage of infrasound. Sajeed (director) told me about this and he kept on referring to many things. He kept asking questions like, 'How can we do it?' or 'Can we do it this way?'
When I went on to check what it actually was, I realised that I have been doing this since 2004! I did not know the technology at that time. In a film like Black (2005), I had used the same kind of thing, like there are certain frequencies that the human ear is not able to hear. But the brain will experience it. We have used those kinds of frequencies and ambisonic recordings of particular spaces that you see in the film to generate that kind of experience. So, watching this film and seeing people get caught up in situations that you do not want to be in, you really feel for them.
It is not like Annabelle or Saw, those kinds of situations where you see a ghost or you get scared or anything like that. It is actually a very emotional story of very innocent people getting caught in a situation. In life, at times you do something thoughtlessly, and the film actually reminds you that you just cannot do things like that. The frivolousness of the youth, you might call it. For me, the main character goes through a kind of redemption in the whole film. So, it is not just another supernatural thriller. It is also a film about redemption. And it is also a film about innocence being torn apart. So, for me, the film works on many levels.
Vadakkan blends Indian folklore with paranormal horror. How do you integrate the traditional Indian sounds into the film's modern horror setting?
Actually, in the very initial part of the film, when we were planning the film, we did a lot of research about paranormal activities and people who have worked in the paranormal spaces. And we have come across quite a few real people and their recordings and their experiences. So, if you notice the audio in the trailer of the film, it is actually based on real paranormal recordings and experiences. Now, the paranormal can be many things. In the Indian tradition, we actually believe that there is pret, bhoot, all that is a part of our existence. For Westerners, it is an alien concept. But Satan is not an alien concept for them.
But for us, being in the in-between space, like a God and a human, that is very much a part of our folklore. And that is very much a part of our northern Kerala folk tradition. You also see such traditions in many parts of India.
Imagine somebody, like a set of people being in that state and when you get a lot of powers in that state, it is very believable and you see it in temples. We draw the paranormal elements from such a tradition. So, this film is not something that is written, or cooked up. The film really has a strong folk tradition embedded as a part of the whole film's narrative.
AI is rapidly transforming various aspects of film making. What role do you see AI playing in the future of sound design?
Of course, sound design is one of the crafts in filmmaking where it is going to get big. AI has a lot of influences. They say about 45% of the jobs are going to be lost. So, we are going to be jobless very soon. But I am not scared of that because for me, AI is another technology. It is actually going to make my things easy. It is going to ease my work if you use technology in the right way. For me, technology is a tool, it is a language through which I communicate. Maybe tomorrow with the help of those technologies, I would be able to communicate in a much different fashion, much better fashion. Maybe I will be able to do a lot more precise work than what I am doing now. So, I am looking forward to how the system is evolving.
I am already using a lot of AI tools for my work and I am extremely happy with it. In the last 3-4 years, things that we thought were unachievable 10 years ago have been easily done with the AI tools. And I have used AI tools in this film as well for creating certain sounds, creating certain ambience, creating certain voices.
I am looking forward to embracing AI. You do not have to get scared about AI. It is all about asking the right questions.
Do you believe AI-generated sound could ever match the emotional depth of human created soundscapes?
It is actually a very interesting question. Can AI match what humans create? AI is artificial intelligence and humans are real intelligence. What I give to my audience is my own experiences or my imagination about experiences within that realm of things at that moment. In AI, what is most important is how you give the input feeds, input data.
What are the inputs that you are able to give to the AI? Then only AI will be able to give you an output. So, the questions are very important. What is it that you are asking the machine to do?
And it comes from its own machine learning data. It can only give you what is in the data. For example, when I was testing an AI tool, one day I decided to have some fun with it. So, I sat non-stop for about two and a half, three hours and I kept on asking questions about sound to an AI tool. After two and a half hours, the machine told me, 'Okay, I am tired now, let us stop the topic and come back to it.' Because I realised the kind of question that I was asking, it had to do a lot of searching and it can only give me what is available in the cloud right now, whatever is available in the data. When the questions went beyond the data that it has or it had, it says I am tired. So, AI does get tired if you know how to ask the right questions.
How much in-depth questions you are able to ask or how much in-depth details or data you are able to give becomes your proficiency. So, AI is here to stay and it is going to change our life. But not the human experiences. So, I am a strong believer that AI can never replace human intelligence.
You have worked on both Indian and international projects. How does Hollywood's approach to sound design differ from Bollywood and what can we learn from each other?
Interesting. They always innovate, Hollywood. Like we also innovate. I mean, for this film, we have done a lot of unconventional things. But what happens in Indian storytelling is music takes a precedence because the whole music that the Indian people listen to, comes from the films. There is no separate music industry. That's the biggest downfall of the Indian film industry.
Maybe in a way it is also a strength. When Hollywood or the European film industries don't have the burden of giving music to the people. So, they stick to good writing, they stick to good storytelling.
They also stick to finding new ways of telling stories and sound becomes a very important aspect in that. Whereas we always resort into, 'Okay, if in the sequence the audience should feel jittery, let's put some music.' We tend to look for an easy way out because we have the accessibility of music. And I don't think such accessibility is good. Take the craft to the next level where the world is taking. So, that I feel is the biggest difference.
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