
When it comes to horror films, production teams work hard to find new approaches to scare audiences. Today, with Dolby Atmos and immersive sound growing in popularity, there are even more ways to give viewers a fright. That's exactly what Re-recording Mixer Jonathan Wales accomplishes for the horror shows and films on which he works, both as a freelancer and for Warner Brothers Studios.
Wales didn't set out to specialize in horror, but a 30-year-long career path brought him there. I tend to work on a lot of horror movies, he says. It wasn't supposed to be that way, but when you start doing something well, people notice, and you end up doing more of it. It was an accidental career path, but it's a fun genre to work in. Right now, there's probably an even amount of time spent between original series content and horror films and shows.
Among Wales' most notable mixing projects are Netflix projects like Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and Fall of the House of Usher. His feature-length film credits include Insidious, The Red Door and The Black Phone. When he's not working on re-recording projects, Wales is also a scoring mixer and is credited with mixing the score for every Mike Flanagan project, from the first episode of Haunting of Hill House in 2018, forward.
Wales says he has also seen a change in the way directors and producers attack horror projects. Over the past five to 10 years, there has been an increasing trend towards mixing in Atmos as the primary format, he explains. That requires us to have solutions that handle a lot of detailed format conversions like upmixing and downmixing, while simultaneously managing level specs. That's how I've come to grow my relationship with NUGEN Audio.
Wales credits the brand's Halo Upmix as being one of his go-to tools. It sounds natural and you can control what it's doing in a very understandable way, he continues. It's one thing to be able to make tweaks in a plug-in, it's quite another to have them be predictable and do what you expect. That's one great benefit of NUGEN plug-ins. Another thing I like about Halo Upmix is that it has relatively low latency. Some upmixing plug-ins have incredible processing delays and that's not very useful. People in my line of work can't use extremely high-latency plug-ins while working in real-time.
Halo Upmix has become a staple on Wales' scoring work as well. It played a huge role on the Fall of the House of Usher,' he adds. I use it on all sorts of audio elements, including things you wouldn't expect like individual stereo background files. Sometimes I like to deploy it just to see what happens. With music especially, there are always songs we try to make sound bigger. One of the great things about this plug-in is when you expand a track and then later have to fold it back down, your efforts aren't working against you. There are plug-ins out there that do an okay job making tracks sound bigger, but when it comes time to make the tracks smaller, they start sounding really strange. Halo Upmix doesn't suffer from that problem. It's very up-down compatible. NUGEN was also one of the first companies that provided a way to fully upmix beyond 5.1, into Atmos, in a way that makes sense.
As many of Wales' latest projects are for Netflix, keeping his projects to spec has become especially critical. We use NUGEN's VisLM loudness meter as a sort of bible on level specs, he says. That plug-in is very important because it maintains a history of what you've been doing over the length of the program. So, if something isn't quite in spec, you can find the exact placement of the problem and go directly to that section to make corrections. The results are reflected in real-time, so you can decipher if you're making something better. It provides exceptional visual feedback of the information that you need.
Wales says NUGEN Audio's Halo Downmix is another of his go-to solutions. There are many downmix plug-ins, and, to some degree, they all do the same thing, but Halo Downmix actually gives you a level of base management control when going from 5.1 to stereo, he says. Its feedback also massively exceeds all other plug-ins. As we're having to cope with even larger formats folding down, I think Halo Downmix has become an increasingly important tool for me. It used to be that it didn't make a difference which fold-down software you used, but all the extra tools you get from Halo Downmix are very important and they have a good reason to be there.
As a longtime NUGEN user, Wales says Halo Upmix, Halo Downmix and VisLM those three plug-ins are in every template I have. There is no scenario where I'm not using them. The plug-ins are very well written, by people who really care. When you're using tools that are involved in your final delivery chain, that's really important.
Wales continues on, saying The plug-ins are also very efficient. They're not processor hogs that you can only use offline to experiment. When you get facetime with a director, you want to be able to make changes right there in real-time; these tools allow that. NUGEN is also very good at issuing updates for compatibility or corrections. That level of dependability is important. You want to use tools that you can trust, from companies that stand behind their solutions.
For more information about NUGEN Audio products, visit: https://nugenaudio.com.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
02/05/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
01/05/2026
January 5 2026, 18:30 (PST) NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to ...
20/04/2026
Pro Sound Effects Launches the Industry's First and Only Native Sound Effect...
20/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/04/2026
Blackmagic Design Announces Blackmagic Camera for iOS 3.3 Update
Brie Clayton April 20, 2026
0 Comments
New update adds camera control and monitoring ...
20/04/2026
Maxon Announces Free Tools and Mobile Expansion of ZBrush and Cinema 4D
Brie Clayton April 20, 2026
0 Comments
Cinema 4D brings professional 3D workfl...
20/04/2026
Vizrt AI Keyer kills the green screen and creates virtual scenes in any environm...
20/04/2026
Register now - Market & Audience Department Ask Me Anything (AMA) Session 11 February 2026
Screen Australia Head of Market & Audience Rakel Tansley
Talking to...
20/04/2026
Screen Australia announces funding for 44 documentary projects that reflect a s...
20/04/2026
Screen Australia appoints Tanya Phegan as Narrative Content Head of Development 17 March 2026
Tanya Phegan
Screen Australia has today announced the appointmen...
20/04/2026
Applications Open for Skip Ahead 11 19 March 2026
Past Skip Ahead recipients (L-R): Macfarlane Bros, Rainbow Bop, Lyanna Kea.
Screen Australia and YouTube Aus...
20/04/2026
Screen Australia empowers the next games generation, including new creatives fro...
20/04/2026
Official Co-production Ask Me Anything (AMA) Session 26 March 2026
Image (L-R): Mix Tape, Michele McDonald, Flower & Flour.
Interested in international Co-pro...
20/04/2026
Screen Australia announces Narrative Content funding for 91 projects, including ...
20/04/2026
Production Infrastructure and Capacity Analysis (PICA) pinpoints four key workfo...
20/04/2026
Australians in Film and Screen Australia Announce the 2026 Participants in the T...
20/04/2026
Screen Australia relaunches website with new tools and improved user experience 16 April 2026
Screen Australia relaunches website
Screen Australia has relaun...
20/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/04/2026
Manufacturing is at an inflection point. Across every major industrial economy, ...
20/04/2026
AI agents are transforming how work gets done across all industries, acceleratin...
19/04/2026
Blackmagic Design has announced the ATEM 4 M/E Constellation IP and ATEM 4 M/E Constellation IP Plus, two SMPTE 2110-native live production switchers. The ATEM ...
19/04/2026
Grass Valley is finding the right balance between its hardware heritage with an ...
19/04/2026
Oracle's strategy rests on the foundational strengths of Oracle Cloud Infras...
19/04/2026
Program Productions, the live sports production industry's leading crewer, i...
19/04/2026
At the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas, SVG sat down with Joe Scionti, Account Manage...
19/04/2026
At its 2026 NAB Show keynote event, Ross Video came out swinging with one of its...
19/04/2026
Evertz (Booth N817) is set to present new services within its evertz.io platform...
19/04/2026
Evertz (Booth N817) will showcase its IPMX-certified NUCLEUS platform alongside ...
19/04/2026
Evertz (Booth N817) is set to showcase ENX at NAB 2026, a media core platform designed to support hybrid SDI and IP infrastructures in production facilities and...
19/04/2026
Evertz (Booth N817) will introduce Studer VistaVUE Touch at NAB 2026, a control surface designed to integrate audio, video and control workflows within a custom...
19/04/2026
Evertz (Booth N817) will highlight X-CALIBER at NAB 2026, an encoding and decodi...
19/04/2026
Cobalt Digital (Booth N1340) will introduce the blueCORE family of standalone si...
19/04/2026
Chyron and Asport (Booth N2441) will demonstrate an integrated sports video work...
19/04/2026
MediaKind (Booth W1743) provided an update on its Multiview deployments at NAB S...
19/04/2026
Calrec (Booth C6907) and Grass Valley (Booth C2408) announced a long-term broadc...
19/04/2026
Oracle is bringing a multi-partner demonstration of Media over QUIC (MoQ)-based live streaming to NAB Show 2026, showcasing how independent systems from multipl...
19/04/2026
Encompass Digital Media announced an expanded partnership with Oracle Cloud Infr...
19/04/2026
The NAB Show is in full swing, and the SVG and SVG Europe editorial teams are chasing down the hottest stories from all over the Las Vegas Convention Center. He...
19/04/2026
Blackmagic Design has announced the ATEM 4 M/E Constellation IP and ATEM 4 M/E Constellation IP Plus, two SMPTE 2110-native live production switchers. The ATEM ...
19/04/2026
Now available in VST3, AU and AAX formats
Waves have recently released an update that extends their vocal-alignment plug-in's capabilities to all DAWs -...
19/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...