How Dune created the sinister sounds of those menacing sandworms

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Sound is one of Dune's greatest strengths. The head-rattling vibrations of spaceships taking off, the multi-vocal cacophony of the Voice, and the roar of the desert sandworms helped convince moviegoers to forgo HBO Max and check out director Denis Villeneuve's 2021 sci-fi film on the big screen. Sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green were justly rewarded with an Oscar nomination, and EW spoke with them about how they crafted the noise of the sandworms in particular.

Strategic silence

The sandworm is the signature creation of Dune author Frank Herbert; its mammoth body and gaping mouth adorn many a paperback cover. But Mangini and Green knew what separates the great beast of Arrakis from regular monsters.

"You expect it to have a signature Godzilla roar or something. But early on we realized that rather than being a gross monster with big teeth, the worm is more like a god of the planet Arrakis," Green says. "It's an extraordinary being that isn't just there to scare us."

The worm's appearance is slowly revealed over the course of the film until hero-to-be Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) finally comes face-to-face with one in a climactic confrontation. Suddenly, all sounds drop away in the face of that silent maw.

"We wanted it to be a moment of silent contemplation rather than some huge roar," Green says.

Good vibrations

When EW spoke with Villeneuve last year, he noted that he and production designer Patrice Vermette went through multiple designs for the sandworms in order to craft an animal that could have plausibly evolved in Arrakis' desert environment. Mangini and Green thought just as seriously about how the sandworms' biologic functions would sound.

For instance, the worms burrow their way through the sand, only surfacing when it's time to feed. Large ripples in the sand are therefore known as "wormsign," a signal that the great beast is getting near.

"We thought about these things like: How does the worm actually power itself through the sand?" Green says. "We figured that they vibrate their way through, so when you feel the worm under your feet, you see and hear the sand shaking. It almost turns into quicksand."

Dry run

The defining truth of life on Arrakis is its lack of water. The native Fremen wear stillsuits in order to conserve as much of their body's moisture as possible, while Dune readers know that too much water is actually deadly to sandworms. Mangini and Green kept these important facts in mind when designing the beasts' sound.

"We kept away from effects that made the worms sound too wet," Green says. "We tried to make its mouth sound as ancient and dry as the sands themselves."

The worm whisperer

The native Fremen have a device called a thumper to summon the worms (or summon them away from vulnerable victims). In order for the thumper to work, Mangini and Green reasoned, it would have to sound like the worms themselves: rhythmic and percussive.

"Species adapt to their environments and often their attributes reflect the uniqueness of those individual environments," Mangini says. "So the rhythmic nature of the worm call — this repetitive, percussive sound — is it a reflection of the thumper that the Fremen have developed to call them, or vice versa? It's a chicken or egg circle: Which came first?"

Related content:

• The sound of sand: How Hans Zimmer and Dune collaborators built their sonic sci-fi world
• What Dune's out-of-this-world costumes reveal about its characters
• Doing Dune right: Inside the making of the long-awaited (and star-packed) adaptation