Creating Possession Sounds

I based my work on a few different films and also 'real' exorcism clips from YouTube. I first researched the true case of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who underwent an exorcism and died. Many films, including The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Requiem are based off of her story. However, in reality Anneliese was epileptic, depressed, suicidal and malnourished. Nevertheless, her story is interesting and tapes from the exorcism are fascinating and helped give me an idea for our own sounds.

I also looked at The Exorcism of Emily Rose as a source of inspiration as there is a famous scene which uses some of the techniques I wanted to try:

I found that some conventions of possessed sounds are:

• Speaking in tongues / other languages
• Speaking backwards
• Speaking in Latin
• Saying Biblical things / referring to Demons
• Hissing, spitting, biting, growling
• Unnatural sounding, completely the opposite to whoever the possessed person is

Here is what I did and some attempts:

I used Audacity, as I did last time. This is one of the tutorials I followed and some early attempts:

These screencaps just show the program and how it looks whilst I was using it. It is a fairly simple software to use and I have used it before to create supernatural sounds.

Then I recorded somebody else speaking Latin and fiddled with the effects, adding in some growling sounds...

Evaluation:
It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be and so the results weren't really what I was looking for. I like the growling that I managed to implement in some of the sounds but it was hard to get backwards talking to sound legible. I think that if I were to try this again, I'd find a great audio clip of someone speaking in tongues and edit from there, as it was hard trying to find a good basis to edit from.