• Episode 2 – Joffrey Baratheon’s death: “That one took some time,” says Kimmel. “There’s vocal recordings in there, there’s some animals in there. Once he starts choking it’s not really Joffrey you hear for the most part, even though we recorded the actor doing it. It didn’t sell for us, so we were going into the library and doing our own recordings. There’s a recording . . . it’s a woman impersonating a choking baby. It’s great because it’s a really tight, low sound. We have our producer [Greg Spence] in there. He is Joffrey’s last breath that you hear. We just didn’t have the right last little gasp, and so he did that. Between editorial and mixing it and tweaking it, there’s a good six to eight hours that went into those 30 seconds.”

• Episode 5 —Jon Snow kills Karl Tanner: “Yeah, when it came through the back of his head and out of his mouth!” says Wilhoit. “That was definitely a sword going through cow skull . . . but also I remember filling my mouth with a lot of water and trying to get that gurgle-y kind of sound, opening the throat up and doing a bit of a gag-y sound. I was really happy with the way that turned out!”

• Episode 7—The Mountain de-entrails a slave: “To really sell those intestines, we used boxing gloves. We kind of grind them into the wet mess we make—aloe vera, dirt, pea gravel, all that stuff. You make a little pile and concoction of it, and sometimes you rest the boxing glove on the ground and build all the gooey stuff on top of it and then sort of squeeze it and slap it with your hands to get the timing of the “plop-plop-plop-plop.” And then you go back and do the next piece and go “squish-squish-squish-squish.” And then do it again and get the sound of the wet shammy hitting the dirt. So you perform it three times in the same rhythm with three different textures.”

• Episode 8—Blood dripping from ceiling after Ygritte spares Gilly: “There must’ve been three or four different textures of blood that we used in that to help it seem full and have the different running and dripping sounds. Some of the other drippy stuff was aloe vera to help thicken it.”

• Episode 8—Oberyn Martell’s death: “In the lead-up to the head explosion, the kind of squishy sound, as the fingers are going in, there’s some raw-meat squish that we used, kind of moving it around a little,” says Kimmel. “There’s probably 10 to 12 sounds just on that head pop. A lot of it was stuff I recorded or stuff from our library that we cut together to get the point across. We used squishy wet elements such as fruits and vegetables . . . A lot of the sounds that we mix in are just labeled ‘fruit smash,’ but I believe there is a watermelon in there, because it has some oomph to it. . . . There’s a bubbling sound in there that’s mud bubbling. There’s some crunch in there, some bone breaks. We have actual bone breaks that we’ve recorded over the years, be it chicken bones that we pitch down to make them sound larger, or what have you.”

• Episode 9—Ygritte’s death: “This was a really fun scene to put together,” says Kimmel. “In the middle of all of the chaos, we got to focus on their [Jon and Ygritte’s] world. In the mix, we pull the entire fight way into the background, and make it just about Jon and Ygritte and their moment. We had Rose [Leslie, who plays Ygritte] in for A.D.R. to re-record her little breaths, whimpers, efforts, etc., so we had them clean. She is great with little details like that, capturing frustration and pain in little gasps. The arrow into her had to punch and get our attention. There is a good thud (low-end punch), a crack (vegetable crack, bone crack), and a stab element (recorded knife into flesh).”

And many more in the gallery below...

Game of Thrones Sound Effects Guide



1 / 30 Chevron Chevron Throat Slashing/Blood Spurting “Sometimes, the blood spurting is something in my mouth while I’m doing something—squirting it out or trying to bury my face into a wet shammy, while I’m squeezing that and grinding it on the ground with rock, bamboo, fiberglass pieces—things that sell cartilage,” says Wilhoit. “The shammy does a wonderful job at selling tissue, skin, and flesh. You can kind of slice against another surface, like slice it against a surfboard or on asphalt ground or cement or a piece of wood with some bark on it. You kind of just build this whole science experiment on top of something, and you whip the knife across it while you’re spitting blood and squishing the shammy and doing it all at the same time.”

Expert GIF wrangling by Joanna Robinson.