Recipe for a Spooky Voice Over

As someone who is a total scaredy-cat – shock horror – I’ve never really celebrated Halloween. Each year I dodge the spooky movies and haunted house attractions and instead I can’t wait to whip up a batch of cupcakes decorated with every adorably spooky topper I can find.

Just like my impulse to bake some spectral cakes, the scores of spooky spots advertising everything from cars to chocolates begins before the leaves turn brown. Conjuring up a spine-tingling commercial, complete with an unsettling voice over, is an essential part of many Autumn marketing campaigns.

Here is a perfect recipe for creating a spooktacular voice over to make your hair stand on end.

- Just like choosing a cake flavour before you begin baking, you need to decide the ‘flavour’ of your spooky spot. Are you thinking something à la Hannibal Lecter, that’ll leave us all sleeping with the lights on for the rest of the year, or something a little more vanilla and about as alarming as Casper the Friendly Ghost.

- Now that the fear factor level has been decided, to begin assembling your chilling voice over you will need one killer script - pun absolutely intended.

- Next you’ll need a sprinkle of intensity. Think of every horror film or spooky movie you’ve seen. It not only what a character says but how they say it. A deep and unnerving voice, an unsettlingly slow pace or an agitated rhythm are all techniques used by famously terrifying characters to shake us to our core. You’ll need to find a voice actor who can channel Freddy Kruger or Chucky in their sleep. Or perhaps you need an actor who can bring a cheeky pumpkin or quirky ghost to life.

- A dash of maniacal laughter. Nothing is more adorable and simultaneously terrifying in the right context, as a child’s laugh. It might be cliché, but a little creepy giggle or spot of maniacal laughter goes a long way.

- Mix it all together with an eerie music bed. Add a little Dias Irae, a Gregorian plainchant whose first four notes appear in almost every spooky movie since cinema began, and your audience’s blood will run cold.

Hi, I'm Marilena! I'm a young British Voice Actor with my own broadcast quality home studio based in London. If you'd like to check out some of my previous work and see where you might have heard my voice before, click here to visit my Portfolio.