Between Objectivity and Fear:
Audio Description in
Spanish Horror Films
María López Rubio
Universitat de València and Universitat Jaume I
Horror films rely on emotion and atmosphere to provoke a sensory response in spectators. However, when such films are adapted through audio description (AD) for blind and visually-impaired audiences, tensions arise between the need to convey that emotional charge and the objectivity demanded by official AD standards (AENOR, 2005). This study addresses this issue by investigating the extent to which AD can recreate the experience of fear while remaining accessible.
This research analyses six contemporary Spanish horror films, with a total of 166 AD fragments (López Rubio, 2024). The presence of resources associated with emotional adjectives, interpretive turns of phrase, graphic expressions, and rhetorical figures, is examined based on the theoretical proposals of Ramos Caro (2013) and Romero-Muñoz (2023). The corpus reveals that 40.37% of the segments include subjective trace, suggesting a constant coexistence between objectivity and subjectivity, as previously suggested by authors such as Romero-Muñoz (2023) and López Rubio (2024). Additionally, this study also ascertains the use of non-subjective elements which also contribute to sustaining the tension intrinsic to horror without contravening the principles of objectivity.
The results open new perspectives on the relationship between accessibility and emotion and highlight the importance of considering user reception in future research.
Keywords: Spanish Horror Films, Audio Description, Objectivity, Subjectivity, Blindness and Visual Impairment
References
AENOR (2005). Norma UNE 153020: Audiodescripción para personas con discapacidad visual. Requisitos para la audiodescripción y elaboración de audioguías. Madrid: AENOR.
López Rubio, M. (2024). “Una aproximación a la audiodescripción del terror para personas con discapacidad visual: estudio de un corpus de películas españolas de terror”, Parallèles, 36(2), 35-48. https://www.paralleles.unige.ch/fr/tous-les-numeros/numero-36-2/lopez-rubio
Ramos Caro, M. (2013). El impacto emocional de la audiodescripción. https://digitum.um.es/digitum/handle/10201/36475
Romero-Muñoz, A. (2023). “Multimodal analysis as a way to operationalise objectivity in audio description: A corpus-based Study of Spanish series on Netflix”, Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 6(2), 8-32. https://doi.org/10.47476/jat.v6i2.2023.251
María López Rubio holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting and a Master’s degree in Medical Translation from Universitat Jaume I (Castelló). She completed her PhD at Universitat de València, focusing on audio description within the humorous genre. Her research mainly encompasses the audio description of humour and horror in Spain, as well as accessibility from a multicultural perspective. She has worked in audiovisual accessibility services at the Valencian regional TV channel À Punt Mèdia, where she carried out SDH and AD. She currently teaches at both Universitat de València and Universitat Jaume I.
