Dread: Horror Sound Effects

Fear your game can turn up

101 horror sound effects built around four ladders: the room gets worse, the heart beats faster, the build gets longer and the scare lands deeper, one rung at a time. Wire threat, proximity or sanity to a rung and the sound follows.

Licence, up front

Royalty free. Commercial use. No attribution required. Use it in as many games as you like, on any platform. The one thing you may not do is resell or redistribute the sounds themselves as a sound pack. The plain language terms ship as LICENSE.txt, with a copy and paste credit line for anyone who wants one. Everything is synthesised from code, so there is no upstream sample licence behind it.

Hear it first

There is a free demo on this page: 23 sounds copied unaltered from the paid files. All 5 dread beds and all 5 heartbeat loops, the shortest and the longest riser, one take of every scare rung, a door creak with every take, a knock, a reveal stinger and the creaking house loop.

Four ladders, one variable

Horror is paced: quiet, then worse, then the scare. Each ladder is a set of files named by rung (_t1 to _t5), so your game picks the rung from one number and the pack gets worse in step with it.

• Dread level: 5 ambience beds for one dark place, each tenser than the last. Seamless loops; crossfade between rungs.
• Heartbeat: 5 seamless heartbeat loops, from 55 to 125 beats a minute (one beat every 1.10 s down to 0.48 s).
• Riser: 5 builds before a scare, longer at every rung and cut at the peak so the scare lands in the silence. Two takes each.
• Scare hit: 5 scares from a flinch to the full jump, deeper and heavier at every rung. Two takes each.

Checked from the shipped files, not promised: all 16 steps between rungs move the declared way (at least 8% in brightness on the bed and scare ladders, 12% in length on the heartbeat and riser), and every ladder spans at least 1.5 times end to end. Failing steps: 0.

The house around them

23 sounds for one old house at night, 66 files, every one with takes so the same creak never plays twice in a row:

• Creaks: an old door on a dry hinge, a floorboard in the next room, a stair tread. Stick slip through the wood, not a pitched hum.
• Knocks and slams: three knocks on a heavy door, one knock from somewhere behind you, a door slammed shut by nobody.
• Metal: a rusted chain dragged and dropped, something sharp drawn slowly along metal, an iron gate swinging into its post.
• Breath and air: a slow breath in the dark, something passing just out of sight, a signal breaking up.
• Impacts: a snap underfoot, a body falling on old boards, a thud through the ceiling, a cracked bell far off, a pane cracking.
• Water, stingers and interface: one drip in a quiet cellar, a reveal and a "something is wrong here" stinger, and a quiet menu set.
• 5 ambience loops: wind through a boarded window, an empty room, a dead channel, drips in a cellar and a house settling.

Fit

• WAV and OGG for every file, 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, mono, with a naming manifest listing every file.
• 15 seamless loops with loop points in both formats, and none on a one shot.
• 33 variation sets whose takes are separate renders, never one file re pitched.
• One loudness band: the inner 80 percent of the pack sits inside 2.39 dB, so a slam and a menu tick share a mix.
• Import notes for Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameMaker, RPG Maker and the web, and pack_proof.json with a sha256 and a measurement for every file: 933 checks, 0 failed.

Honest limits

These are synthesised, stylised sounds designed for games, not field recordings. The figures above are signal measurements, not a claim that anything sounds good; that is what the free demo is for. No screams, no voices and nothing musical: the stingers are struck and blown sound, never a chord.

AI disclosure, stated truthfully: the code that generates these sounds was written with AI assistance. The sounds themselves are self contained procedural synthesis by Core Systems Asset Factory, with no generative audio model at any point. The cover art and store graphics are AI generated.

More from the same studio

• Backward, reversed, wrong and uncanny cues for when the house stops making sense.
• Concrete, urban and liminal places in separable layers, every interior carrying the hum of the mains.
• Creature Vocal Forge, monster voice sets for whatever is behind the last door.