Ominous Movie Quotes

The problem with real life is there’s no musical score. In movies, you know you’re in danger because there’s an ominous chord underlining the scene, a dissonant melodic line that warns of sharks in the water and boogeymen behind the door. Real life is dead quiet, so you’re never quite sure if there’s trouble coming up.

At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes.

The problem with real life is there’s no musical score. In movies, you know you’re in danger because there’s an ominous chord underlining the scene,

Star Wars introduced a new way for using the five screen speakers [in theaters]. By pushing left and right sound channels to the farthest out speakers the pair just inside those was made available. Lucas' mixers then placed low frequency effects in those speakers, and named it the 'baby boom' channel. Human ears can hear frequencies up to around 20,000 hertz, and down to around 20 Hertz for very low sounds. Below that you don't *hear* the sound, but if the 'volume' is 'loud' enough, you can *feel* the sound. Super-low frequencies affect us emotionally, usually inducing something like fear. We feel them during earthquakes. Lucasfilm put sound effects in the baby boom channel for audiences to feel--for instance, in the opening shot of Star Wars where the little diplomatic ship is running from the Imperial Cruiser. It's no wonder this is one of the most memorable and ominous shots in cinematic history. It was not only cool looking, but cool *sounding*

The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it,C allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written frequently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we often use these devices to “aestheticize urban space.”4 We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same. That said, the twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, ever the complainer, called this situation “accompanied solitude,” a situation where we might be alone, but we have the

Ominously, food production is beginning to flatten out, both in world grain production and in food harvested from the oceans. The UK government’s chief scientist warned of a perfect storm of exploding population and falling food and energy supplies by 2030. The world will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed an extra 2.3 billion people, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has said, or else face disaster. These projections may underestimate the true scope of the problem. With hundreds of millions of people from China and India entering the middle class, they will want to enjoy the same luxuries that they have seen in Hollywood movies—such as two cars, spacious suburban homes, hamburgers and French fries, etc.—and may strain the world’s resources. In fact, Lester Brown, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and founder of the World Watch Institute in Washington, D.C., confided to me that the world may not be able to handle the strain of providing a middle-class lifestyle to so many hundreds of millions of people.

Salon writer Scot Sea, who said that his experience with his own autistic daughter helped him understand why a California man named Delfin Bartolome had shot his son and then himself. “The odor has finally made its way down the hall. When you see the balled-up pants and diaper on the floor, you know you are too late,” Sea began ominously. “A bright red smear across the door, the molding, the wall. Turn the corner and the bedroom is a crime scene. An ax murder? In fact, it is only your daughter at her worst.” He described a scene worthy of a slasher movie: “Splashes of blood glistening like paint, black clots, yellow-brown feces, and a 3-foot-in-diameter pond of vomit that your daughter stands in the middle of . . . hands dripping, face marked like a cannibal.” Parents in previous eras were spared these horrors, he explained, because “idiot” children were promptly “tossed down the well or thumped against the fence post.” For “educated” families in more recent times, he added, at least there was a way out—institutionalization. But now, desperate parents had to find their own ways out, as Bartolome had been forced to do with a handgun when he ran out of options. This was the harsh reality of raising a child with autism, according to Sea. (He neglected to mention that weeks before the shooting, Bartolome—described by his relatives as a loving and devoted father—had been laid off just before retirement, shunting him into a series of temporary jobs and putting his son’s future care at risk.) Shannon felt herself becoming physically ill while reading Sea’s article. Was this her family’s future? IV

It’s a beautiful sunlit Monday in August, the kind of day that would make your heart sing, your spirit rise. It’s lunchtime, and I’m standing in an absent-minded fog by the German sausage stall in Borough Market, under London Bridge. I can hear the trains rumbling overhead, and it reminds me of that scene from The Godfather, the one where Michael Corleone is about to assassinate his father’s rival mafia boss. Trains always seem to rumble overhead in movies when something ominous is about to happen, and it’s kind of spooky, not to mention fitting, because things couldn’t get much more ominous for me, right now.

And life isn’t like the movies: There’s no ominous swell to the sound track, no fatalistic overhead shot, nothing to tell you that this moment is the one your life will turn on; instead it’s like a train silently switching tracks, sheering off midjourney into a whole other part of the night.

...grand oaks, maples, and chestnuts muscle in on one another, flared in their autumn robes; a motley conflagration under the dazzling mid-October sun. We are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, digging into sprawling hinterlands, into territories of wild earth. The rolling, winding roads away from Bangor took us through towns with names like Charleston, Dover-Foxcroft, Monson, and Shirley, all with their own quaint, beautifully cinematic set dressing. It was like each was curated from grange hall flea markets and movie sets rife with small-town Americana. Stoic stone war memorials. American flags. Whitewashed, chipping town hall buildings from other centuries. Church bell towers in the actual process of tolling, gonging, calling. To me, the sound was ominous in a remote sort of way, unnamable.

When I’d clambered up there as an adult, alone, I’d been struck by how claustrophobic the view looked, with new buildings filling the neighborhoods around us, where there had once been open air. Cranes loomed ominously over the surrounding blocks like invaders from an alien movie, mantis-like shadows with red eyes blinking against the night, the American flags attached to them flapping darkly in the wind, signaling that they came in peace when really they were here to destroy.

Special government bodies were created to control—according to the requirements of “the public interest”—every aspect of literature, music, the fine arts, the theater, the movies, radio, and the press. Hundreds of tons of books were destroyed; the Marxists and the cultural modernists (and several other groups) had done their job; Hitler had no further need for anarchy and subversion of the system. The Churches were not regarded as subversive; though harassed and intimidated, they were allowed to function.

Ed. Note: if this were a movie, OMINOUS BLACK CAR MUSIC would start here

this were a movie, OMINOUS BLACK CAR MUSIC would start here