We can’t help but chuckle at the new Instagram account we discovered this week, @Bad_Foley. It’s a clever little series that celebrates the technical side of cinema by showing us what iconic movie scenes might have looked like without a talented foley artist.
“Foley,” if you’re not aware of the term, is the profession of cinematic soundscaping. A good foley artist can look at any on-screen action and find a way to replicate the sound in a way that sounds visceral and more real than real life—whether that’s the sound of a fist slamming into someone’s face, or a gun being fired, or simply the sound of a pair of high heels on a tile floor. When anything about a film’s natural sound needs work, foley artists are there. In recent years, we even got a horror film about the people who make gory foley sound effects, Berberian Sound Studio.
@Bad_Foley, on the other hand, makes a joke out of famous movie scenes by showing us what they might be like with terrible sound effects, which is irresistibly funny. In the last few months, the account has tackled snippets from scenes in the likes of Pulp Fiction, Back to the Future and The Empire Strikes Back, but the masterpiece has to be the below clip from Independence Day, which undermines Bill Pullman’s classic speech with steadily mounting wind and feedback noises from his microphone. It’s absurd, but somehow brilliant.
Check out the rest of these bad foley examples at the account’s Instagram page, and enjoy a bonus lesson in foley below from a classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 host segment on the same topic.