White Noise (2005)

[Mr_Vindictive]

My wife finally talked (forced) me into renting White Noise yesterday.  We sat down last night with some pizza and watched one of the worst paranormal films to come out in recent memory.

I remember seeing the trailer for White Noise numerous times late last year and actually thought it looked pretty good.  The trailer was pretty much trying to sell to you that E.V.P. is real and had clips from various E.V.P. tapes.  The trailer gave me a little tiny spark of hope that the film would take a serious look at E.V.P. and not just whore it out for cheap scares.  All hope of that was killed when the film started.

Michael Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers.  His wife Anna has just turned up dead in the local river and a E.V.P. investigator claims that she has been trying to reach him.  Jonathan then goes completely crazy over the E.V.P. thing and starts recording TV fuzz for endless hours.  This eventually turns into a murder mystery.......yawn...

I have done E.V.P.s in the past.  I've heard "things" on recordings where I was the only one in the room; yet I am still skeptical.  I believe the recordings are proof of something, but what I'm not sure.

But, this film gets it completely wrong.  At first, the E.V.P. thing starts out well with Jonathan hearing his dead wife on a tape.  But then it gets completely off track with him recieving phone calls from his dead wife's cell phone and he begins to see her in the fuzz on TV.  This is where the film really started to p**s me off.  I have NEVER seen a real case of visual E.V.P.!  I've seen hoaxes but never anything that was nearly reliable.  

Overall, this is a film to miss.  It takes an extremely interesting practice and idea and rapes the hell out of it.  It's boring throughout it's runtime and offers absolutely nothing.

1/10 - I only gave it one point because it's good to see Keaton acting again.  I just hope next time he picks a better friggin script.

[odinn7]

I haven't seen this because I pretty much heard the same things that you just said when the movie came out in the theater. Hollywood couldn't take EVPs as they are and make them exciting enough without adding stupid crap. I won't bore anyone by going into the whole methodology of how this all works but suffice it to say, it's not real exciting.

[Mr_Vindictive]

What made me even more mad was that after watching the flick I went into the special features and there was a special feature all about "REAL" E.V.P.s.  

I clicked it on and it started with a host.  Yes, there was actually a designated host to the 15 min documentary.  After about three minutes or so I turned it off after realizing that it was all fake.  It wasn't intentionally obvious, and I'm sure it was there to fool the various people who bought the film thinking that was exactly how E.V.P. happens.  The short consisted of a fiftyish husband and wife as they went to various locals trying to record E.V.P.s.  

Take the budget of an episode of Sightings (God I miss that show) and cut it in half.  Then hire actors to talk complete nonsense about something they had never heard of until the paycheck arrived and you've got this documentary.

[h.p. Love]

Skaboi - Can you share some of your E.V.P. experiences? I had a similar experience with an old intercom system in my parents' house about 16 years ago. Basically, late at night I heard noises in the basement and walked over to the kitchen intercom thinking that the unit in the basement would reveal something.

For many minutes I turned it off and on and off again, listening for the basement noise with it and without it. I was pressing my ear up to the speaker but it wasn't any help. About the tenth time I turned it on, with my ear up to the speaker, I heard a gutteral breathing, like some monster just ran a 100 yard dash. It was clear as day, no background noise at all, and definitely not an animal. Whatever it was sounded as if it was "talking" directly into another one of the intercoms.

I was sober as a judge when this happened and remember the whole experience vividly. I've never taken any hallucinagenic drugs, etc. This was very real and I have no plausible explanation for it. It never happened again, although I used to be very uncomfortable in the basement, especially in the evenings.

[odinn7]

Perhaps the intercom was picking up some sort of interference or maybe intercepting a transmission of some sort. I'm not saying I doubt you, just giving possibles for you to consider.
Most EVPs are really subjective. They contain some noise and if someone mentions to you what it's supposed to be saying, you can suddenly hear it say that. I have heard a few that actually sound like something but most are just garbage noise. I'm sure Skaboi will agree for the most part.

We actually had a thread on this months ago.

Edit-
We had 2 threads that covered this. One was someone experiencing interference and it was explained fairly well.
Interference Thread

And the other was discussing EVP.
EVP Thread



Post Edited (05-24-05 10:49)

[Mr_Vindictive]

I'm completely with Odinn7.  There's no such thing as a clear E.V.P.  Most of the time what you get is a lot of static.  If someone tells you it says something then most of the time you will hear what the other person told you to hear.  

That's why I'm pretty skeptical about it all.  I just believe that it's a practice that hasn't been well defined.  There needs to be a lot more experimentation with E.V.P.s.  

With your experience.....was your house near a major highway?  A lot of the time, electronics will pick up on trucker's CB radios.  It's not uncommon for a radio/telephone or in your case an intercom (especially an old one) to pick up some type of CB frequency.  The heavy breathing might have been from a late night trucker-trucker CB sex session.  :o)

[ulthar]

Skaboi wrote:

>  The heavy breathing might have been from a
> late night trucker-trucker CB sex session.  :o)
>

Or simply someone playing a joke.  Just a thought.

One thing to think about: digital processing is very good at extracting 'real' signals from 'static.'  If the EVP is recorded, and you have some saying there is something there and others saying there is not, it SHOULD be pretty straight forward to make that determination.

This assumes that the signal itself is also be recorded.

[BeyondTheGrave]

I saw White Noise in the theaters awhile ago and thought it was ok. Nothing I see again though. Horror movies are dime a dozen now a days.

__________________________________________
"I am going to shoot you! go ahead I deflect bullets"

[h.p. Love]

Skaboi wrote:

> With your experience.....was your house near a major highway?
> A lot of the time, electronics will pick up on trucker's CB
> radios.  It's not uncommon for a radio/telephone or in your
> case an intercom (especially an old one) to pick up some type
> of CB frequency.  The heavy breathing might have been from a
> late night trucker-trucker CB sex session.  :o)
>

No major highway around. Two lanes: one each way. Not a truck route. I've thought about most possibilities but this was a town of about 1400. I was a teenager and no one I knew would be doing that sort of thing, if for no other reason than we weren't into airwave type stuff. Also a really quiet neighhborhood. I had gotten home from helping close the pizza place where I worked so it was around two in the morning. Also, I was counting the tips I had made at the time and only the tv was on. It was quiet because my vcr was doing the blue light thing. Whatever the sound was, the coincidence would be amazing in itself.

What I heard didn't exactly put visions of truckers in my head. Large Marge on her deathbed maybe.

[odinn7]

ulthar wrote:

>
> One thing to think about: digital processing is very good at
> extracting 'real' signals from 'static.'  If the EVP is
> recorded, and you have some saying there is something there and
> others saying there is not, it SHOULD be pretty straight
> forward to make that determination.
>

In theory that sounds like it would work and really, it should. The problem is that most EVPs really seem to be just a collection of noise, literally. If you take a recorder and have someone talk into it, you can clearly hear what they say when it's played back. You could take that to 100 other people and at least 95 of them will clearly tell you what is said. With an EVP, you can take the recording to 100 other people and probably get 100 different answers. If you tell them ahead of time what it's supposedly saying, most of them will agree that they hear it saying that. I had the opportunity to actually do an accidental experiment on this very thing when I was on an investigation back in April. I won't go into details because most of you don't care about that and I don't want to throw this way off topic but there was an accidental "EVP" caught and people not only got excited about it but they started to argue about what it said. It wasn't an EVP at all and what they were arguing about was nowhere even close...I know...it was me. It was funny and quite eye opening but back to the subject. I have heard some EVPs that are digitally cleaned and they often sound like cleaner renditions of noise. Others that are cleaned make me wonder how much enhancing was done and if that has any effect on what you're really hearing. Same thing with digital pictures. I have seen some of these enhanced and cleaned and it turns my skepticism knob all the way up if you  know what I mean.
I'm into this stuff but I am the skeptic of the group. I will not believe just to believe.

[Fearless Freep]

100 other people and at least 95 of them will clearly tell you what is said. With an EVP, you can take the recording to 100 other people and probably get 100 different answers. If you tell them ahead of time what it's supposedly saying, most of them will agree that they hear it saying that. I had the opportunity to actually do an accidental experiment on this very thing...

I did my own ad-hoc experiment one night when an E.V.P guy was on Art Bell.  I would turn down the radio when he was about to explain what we would 'hear' and then turn it back up a few seconds later to catch the sound clip.  When I wasn' prompted by what would be there, I heard nothng at all, just noise.

[2xSlick]

This is a slightly personal question for H.P. Love:
When you heard the heavy breathing, did you poop your pants? Cause you know, I would have. I would have pooped them good, then ran screaming to my shotgun. Then I'd feel better after shooting my house full of holes.  I'd still poop my pants though.

[ulthar]

Fearless Freep wrote:

>
> I did my own ad-hoc experiment one night when an E.V.P guy was
> on Art Bell.  I would turn down the radio when he was about to
> explain what we would 'hear' and then turn it back up a few
> seconds later to catch the sound clip.  When I wasn' prompted
> by what would be there, I heard nothng at all, just noise.
>

This reminds me of a high school class I was in where we were studying backward masking on Rock albums.  I recall one instance in which we were listening to a guy on a talk show or some such talking about how backward masking was the voice of satan or his minions.  He played a clip of part of a song backwards (I don't recall the band or the song) and it sounded like the typical junk.

Everyone in the class just sorta looked around at each other saying "huh? I did not hear anything."  Then, the guy said, "I'm going to play it again; see if you can hear "Satan is Lord" on there."  He did, and virtually everyone in the class said "oh yeah, I heard it that time."

That pretty much convinced me it was crap.

[h.p. Love]

Back in the analog days, a buddy of mine worked at a radio station took that madonna song with the slow drum beat back when she had that sex book outm and taped it backward. It was the song that Wayne and Garth parodied on SNL. I definitely heard pure evil.

[ulthar]

Wouldn't listening to Madonna forwards be pure evil (or, er, at least hell) as well?