Mortal Kombat Video Reveals How the Movie’s Gory Sounds Were Made

The Mortal Kombat movie that released this year has all sorts of brutal fights and squishy Fatalities to satisfy fans, but those clashes wouldn’t be the same without the right sound effects to compliment the blows and special moves. In a new video featuring the sound team that worked on Mortal Kombat, we got to see just how some of those sounds were created behind the scenes to get the right effect for what happened in the movie.

The video below from Insider was shard by Mortal Kombat writer Greg Russo to give some insights into how different noises from the movie were made. Whether it was for Mileena unhinging her jaw or the squelching noises of a Fatality being inflicted on someone, the sound team came up with some create solutions for noises they needed.

Robert Mackenzie, a sound designer who worked on Mortal Kombat, said very few noises in the movie were digital noises and that most of them were created by hand. For Mileena’s jaw unhinging, for example, the team used things like celery, bell peppers, and wet gravel to create the right sound to accompany flesh and bone separating.

Elsewhere in the video, we got to see how some of Mortal Kombat’s more gruesome kills were made. Take the deaths of Nitara and Reiko for example, characters who met their end at the hands of Kung Lao and Jax, respectively, with spectacles of blood and gore accompanying their deaths. For both of those kills, foley artist Adrian Medhurst employed the use of things like wet noodles, newspaper, and melons to get the right effects. Squishing these things barehanded, stomping on them, and hitting them with hammers were all actions taken to get the desired noises for the scenes. Later on in the process, things like a slithering octopus noise were added to amplify the noises.

Mortal Kombat is likely still in theaters near you if you want to go hear all the innovative noises yourself, but the film’s not available through HBO Max any longer, so watching it that way isn’t an option. If you’ve already seen it and can still recall all the Fatalities that accompanied those sounds, you can check out our list of the best Fatalities here to see if our opinions line up with yours.