Spooky Animal Sounds

Seagoon: I say... will all those prairie dogs never stop howling?
Grytpype-Thynne: They're always howling.... no trees on the prairie.

—The Goon Show, "The Call of the West"

Sound plays an important role in setting ambience, and animal noises in particular are a common way of establishing a place's character or a scene's tone. A certain set of common noises, in particular, is often used to establish that a given place is intimidating, spooky, or potentially dangerous. Typically, the animals used in this role are ones that have both strong negative cultural connotations and distinctive or loud calls.

• Cats yowling or screeching. When not played for comedy or portrayed as singing, the night time yowling of a cat can be used to add a spooky atmosphere. This might come from the association of cats with witches, or because they're somewhat sneaky animals, or it may just be because cats come out at night.
• Crows and ravens cawing. Corvids are often perceived as sinister animals or omens of ill luck, and their harsh, croaking calls are often used to unnerve characters or startle the audience. Notably, this is the likeliest noise to be heard during the day.
• Owls hooting. Owls, like corvids, have a strong connotation as ill-omened and sinister birds. Their quiet, almost mournful calls have often been taken as omens of death, and hearing them as characters explore a dark forest or a nighttime graveyard can serve to similarly establish a sense of lingering, faceless dread and approaching misfortune.
• Wolves, coyotes and jackals howling. Large canids, unlike most of these animals, can be an active threat to humans. A wolf's lingering howl or a coyote's yelping song herald a much more direct sense of danger, as they tell listeners that they have entered a place of peril, and are among creatures that can do them very real harm — especially when, after the howl dies down, others answer it from all sides...

Notably, the actual animals making these calls can go entirely unseen. They can and do appear on screen, if only briefly or silhouetted against the stars, but just as often they serve primarily as auditory cues to set a scene's tone.

As an auditory trope, this is most common in mediums such as film and animation, where it has the most obvious and direct impact on the audience, but is not inherently limited to them.

This is a mainstay of horror movies, especially Gothic Horror and most instances where a Creepy Cemetery, Haunted Castle or Haunted House is visited. In video games, these noises are often part of the soundtrack or background ambience for Big Boo's Haunt and The Lost Woods. Compare Jungles Sound Like Kookaburras and Noisy Nature.

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Examples

Comic Books

• Invoked Trope in the prequel comic Stardew Valley Before the Farmer, the comic book in every chapter has a suggested track from the game's soundtrack to play while reading it, and during the Fall chapter which shows the decline of Pelican Town due to the opening of the JojaMart, it suggests the track titled "Fall (Raven's Descent)" in which raven caws are heard during it.

Fan Works

• Nine Days Down: While crossing a dark forest in Tartarus, Twilight and her group are accompanied by the noises of unseen creatures, ranging from rustlings in the bushes to a distant echoing howl, although the makers of these sounds are never seen.

Films — Animation

• The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: On his way home from the Van Tassel Halloween party, Ichabod Crane is spooked by the sounds of crickets, owls, and frogs; and, already freaked-out as he is, imagines that they're warning him to turn back.
• The Lorax (2012): The place the Once-ler lives is framed as pretty unsettling, because it's out of town (and, in Thneedville, it's against the law to leave town), and it's polluted so grass doesn't grow there and it's smoggy. Some crows can be seen and they caw ominously, and they're stated to be the only birds that sing there.
• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: After trying to get Tigger lost in the woods and only managing to lose his own way, Rabbit spends a miserable foggy night wandering around the woods and becoming increasingly more freaked out by the sounds of frogs calling and a caterpillar noisily eating leaves, which his stressed imagination turns into a discordant cacophony.
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: At the beginning, a policeman is patrolling the town at night, and the audience is led to believe the were-rabbit is around (though it actually isn't). At one point, a cat yowls in the background.

Films — Live-Action

• Conspiracy (2001), a Holocaust drama, has a flock of crows heard cawing at the beginning, symbolically heralding the planned genocide.
• Donor: Orgil spends a scary night in the snowy woods near the border, as wolves howl and one is seen briefly circling around his position.
• Fangs of the Living Dead: Wolves are often heard baying into the night to reinforce the film's spooky feeling.
• Mad Max: The cawing of crows is used in the films to show the World Half Empty as our hero travels the gang-plagued highways and deserts of Australia.
• Nosferatu the Vampyre: Wolves are heard howling during dinner on Harker's first night at the castle, making an already painfully quiet and awkward occasion into a truly creepy one.
• The Wizard of Oz: When the heroes are traversing a spooky forest that's rumoured to be haunted, eerie bird calls can be heard in the background.
• Young Frankenstein: Parodied alongside other horror movie tropes. As Frederick, Inga and Igor cross the forest to reach the Frankenstein castle, a wolf howls in the distant night. Inga, afraid, asks if it's a werewolf. Igor, thinking she's asking where the wolf is, points in its direction.
  Inga: Werewolf?
  Igor: There wolf. There castle.

Literature

• The Howling (1977): On her first night in Drago, Karyn is deeply unsettled by the sound of howling from the woods near her house. Her husband doesn't much notice or care at first, but Karyn is unnerved that the howling continues night after night, sometimes sounding as though it's right outside their house. Roy tries to reassure Karyn it's probably just a coyote or even an owl, but she believes it's a wolf despite them being uncommon to the area. She later begins to suspect the howling is not from an ordinary wolf but a werewolf. As Karyn and Chris are fleeing from Drago as it burns, Karyn is horrified that she can still hear howling, meaning at least some of the werewolves survived.
• The Nameless Offspring: Henry only once hears the ghoul-human hybrid's voice in the form of a long ululation that begins low and muffled and ends in a shrill fury. It is a sound that leaves him no doubt that the stories about the secret of Tremoth Hall he'd been told in his youth are true.
• Off To Be The Wizard: This becomes plot relevant. Hearing the same dog howling too many times tips off the heroes that it's one of their friends signaling for help after being turned into a ghost.
• Viy: When Khoma goes to the church on the fateful third night, as Viy the demon is soon to arrive, the air is filled with loud howling. One of his companions notes that this howling does not belong to a wolf, and that "something else must be making the sound".

Video Games

• Banjo-Kazooie: The soundtrack prominently features howling wolves in the background ambiance of various "spooky areas", such as Mad Monster Mansion in the first game and Witchyworld's "horror zone" in the sequel.
• Fear the Moon: Jane is unsettled when she hears something howling in the woods, telling her friends it sounded like a wolf. James tries to reassure her that wolves haven't been common to the area for around 200 years and that it was probably a bobcat, adding that they sometimes sound like a screaming person. Then Jack chips in that it could've been the Wolfman.
• The Legend of Zelda: In Ocarina of Time and other games, the fall of night is signified by a howling sound]].
• Stardew Valley: If you leave one of your coop or barn animals outside overnight, there's a chance they'll be attacked or killed by wild animals, signified by howling sounds heard during the night. There's also strange animal sounds heard when it rains, which many players have found creepy.

Western Animation

• Canhead: Unseen creatures are heard howling as Jay beds down for the night, setting the tone for the surreal and frightening things that he is about to experience.
• The Loud House: Sometimes, crows can be heard cawing in the background in scenes focusing on Lucy, since she's the spooky sister (wanting to be a mortician and/or vampire, dressing in black, etc.)
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Stare Master": An owl hoots ominously when the Crusaders venture into the dangerous Everfree Forest. Afterwards, unidentified animals call and warble in the background for most of the forest sequence.
  • "Putting Your Hoof Down": When Rarity and Pinkie visit Fluttershy's home to find that it has become an Old, Dark House with boarded up windows, an unseen wolf is heard howling in the distance.
  • "Sleepless in Ponyville": During the weekend forest camping trip, Scootaloo finds herself gripped by terror at the idea of spending the night in the forest and spends both nights startling at a variety of intimidating noises, with wolf howls punctuating creaking branches and blowing wind.
• The Real Ghostbusters: "Poultrygeist": Subverted. The beginning scene takes place at night and an eerie wolf's howl can be heard, but it turns out to be from a movie that the farmer is watching.
• The Simpsons: A cawing crow is often heard in establishing shots of the Springfield nuclear plant, as a sign of the ominous and unsafe doings that often occur therein.

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