Continuing our countdown to Halloween is another Susan King special touting what will be a cool look by many of the creators of audible terror at some of film's greatest scary tales -- from 1925's "The Phantom of the Opera" to "Poltergeist" and "The Thing." Just spotlighting another event for fear-seeking fanboys and followers of classic Hollywood alike. -- Jevon Phillips

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences explores the things that go boo  tonight at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. But don’t expect any scholarly examination of the use of sound in horror films at "The Sound Behind the Image III: Real Horrorshow!"

"I think what it really amounts to is a ... horror movie night in the doors with friends, pizza and some horror movies," says the program host, veteran sound editor David E. Stone, who won an Oscar for his spook-tacular work on the 1992 horror hit, "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

"What we are going to do is have a handful of basically post-production sound people each introducing clips of a horror movie where we think there is something interesting to say on how the sound was treated," says Stone. "The most exciting role that sound can play in a horror movie is that enhances what you don’t see , and that adds to the suspense."

Sometimes silence is golden in horror movies.

"Scholars tell us sound was always thought about in silent films," says Stone. "It was made part of the story by the composition of music or the characters’ miming that they heard something."

To illustrate the point, Stone will be showing the famous clip from 1925's "The Phantom of the Opera" where Mary Philbin rips off the mask of the Phantom (Lon Chaney), and her silent scream literally echoes in audiences’ ears.

Besides Stone, Oscar-nominated sound effects editors Mark Mangini and Richard L. Anderson will offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the chilling sound effects were created for 1982’s "Poltergeist." Foley artist Vanessa Theme Ament will discuss the work of master foley artist John Post, who was responsible for the terrifying sound effects on John Carpenters 1982 "The Thing." And veteran Oscar-winning production sound mixer Gene Cantamessa and supervising sound editor Don Hall will discuss their work on Mel Brooks' classic 1974 horror spoof, "Young Frankenstein."

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. For more information, go to www.oscars.org.

-- Susan King

Photo: Winona Ryder stars as Mina Murray/Elisabeta and Gary Oldman stars as Dracula in "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Credit: Columbia Pictures

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Next Tuesday (Aug. 11), "Starman" will be available for the first time on Blu-Ray. Dennis Lim went back to reevaulate the film and its director, John Carpenter, in this piece from the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.

John Carpenter, who has not directed a feature film since "Ghosts of Mars" in 2001, seems to recede further into the margins of American pop culture with each passing year. Even in the more productive phases of his career, he was damned with faint praise, as a B-movie or horror specialist who never matched the promise of his breakthrough film, the slasher landmark " Halloween."

This was not lost on Carpenter, who supposedly once observed that while he's considered an auteur in Europe, "in the U.S., I'm a bum."

This month sees the Blu-ray release of the director's "Starman" ( Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $28.95) and "Big Trouble in Little China" (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, $29.99). These two '80s films reinforce the sense of Carpenter as a kind of shadow Steven Spielberg, a deft, sometimes ingenious commercial craftsman who recognized the unpretentious pleasures as well as the subversive potential of genre entertainment but was inevitably eclipsed by that decade's dominant American filmmaker.

Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982), a remake of Howard Hawks' Cold War allegory "The Thing From Another World," opened within weeks of Spielberg's much cuddlier and vastly more popular "E.T.:The Extra-Terrestrial." "Starman" is a transparent stab at atonement, a friendly-alien weepie to file alongside "E.T." and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

In response to the invitation of the Voyager space probe, an extraterrestrial being lands in the Midwest, where it assumes human form as a young widow's recently dead husband. After a superbly tense opening sequence, in which Karen Allen's terrified heroine watches her visitor grow from infancy into Jeff Bridges in a matter of seconds, the film settles into the familiar rhythms of a romantic road movie...

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

-- Dennis Lim

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CREDIT: "Starman" photo -- Sony Pictures

Welcome to today's edition of Everyday Hero, your roundup of hand-picked headlines from across the fanboy universe ...

A WEDDING GOWN WITH "FRINGE": Ah,  weddings always make me cry ... especially when the groom is a dead counter-agent involved in a shadowy global conspiracy. I'm a big fan of "Fringe" and its star, Anna Torv, and apparently so is coy costar Mark Valley (whose name, by the way, keeps popping up when people discuss the film adaptation of certain Marvel Comics icon). Here's the report from gossip writer Kristin Dos Santos: "A rep for Anna Torv has just confirmed to us that the 'Fringe' star secretly married Mark Valley, who plays her love interest on the Fox show. OK, 'love interest' may be simplifying things just a wee bit. Mark plays her ex-lover John Scott, who turned out to be evil and died, but then came back to the series through hallucinations. (Just another day in the world of J.J. Abrams.) So when and where did the wedding ceremony go down? And more importantly, who even knew these two were together at all? Though Torv's rep declined to provide further details, sources on the show tell us the small, private ceremony took place over the holidays. The pair has been quietly dating for several months -- so quietly that many of their fellow castmates and crew members weren't aware they were together. Neither was the press. On Thursday, Valley took part in a conference call with reporters, and talked about his new bride (without referencing her as such). 'I think [Anna] is just a fantastic actor and I really like working with her,' he said. 'She's my favorite on the show, to be honest with you.' (We should hope so!)" [E! Entertainment]

IF YOU PLAN TO E-MAIL WORF... : I read this story saying that Klingon is now the "world's most widely spoken fictional language" but ... uh ... is it really fictional if people actually speak it? I mean, is it less real than pig Latin? I'm just saying. Anyway, the story is about a computer keyboard for Klingon speakers. I'm absolutely serious, and so is reporter Alex Fletcher's story: "Keyboards featuring the letters from the Klingon alphabet have gone on sale in Britain. Designed for Star Trek fans who have learned to speak and write in the alien language, they are priced £43.99. Developed into a full language by Marc Okrand, Klingonese was first devised by actor James Doohan for 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture.' 'The Klingon keyboard is the first step in providing PC input devices for all Federation cultures and will aid communications between Earth and other cultures within the Federation that fall outside the domain of Starfleet command,' said Cherry Electrical Products' Michael Groom. 'Of course, this keyboard demonstrates our capability to deliver custom keyboard designs, keycaps and layouts -- whether on this planet or elsewhere in the universe.' It is reportedly the most widely spoken fictional language in the world, and texts such as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare have been translated into the language." [Digital Spy]  ALSO: For great moments in the Klingon language -- such as Frasier Crane's speech in Klingon -- check out the video at the very bottom of this post ...

VIVE LE POTTER!: The Associated Press reports that "Harry Potter" is all the rage in Paris. "France paid homage to the author behind fiction’s most famous boy magician by inducting 'Harry Potter' series author J.K. Rowling into the country’s prestigious Legion of Honor on Tuesday. French President Nicolas Sarkozy bestowed Rowling with the honorary title of knight in the legion during a ceremony in a gilded hall in the Elysee presidential palace. The British writer leapt to worldwide fame with the 1997 publication of 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,' the first of her mega-hit seven-part series. The books have sold more than 400 million copies and been translated into 67 languages, including French. In 2003, even before it was translated into French, 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' — the fifth book in the series — became the first book in English ever to top the French bestsellers list. Created by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 19th century, the Legion of Honor is France’s elite national merit society. Although foreigners cannot be officially inducted, they are routinely made honorary recipients." [AP]

JOHN CARPENTER, INSTITUTIONALIZED: Here's a short blurb from the trades about a horror icon's next project: "Director John Carpenter is back, signing on to direct ghost story 'The Ward' for indie Echo Lake. Amber Heard ('Pineapple Express') will star as a haunted woman in a mental institution. Carpenter hasn't directed a feature since 'Ghosts of Mars' in 2001; 'The Informers,' starring Heard and helmed by Gregor Jordan, bowed in Sundance. [Variety]

"TRON" AS VIDEO GAME: Gaming blogger Ben Fritz has a good-news/bad-news update about the making of a video game to complement the big "Tron" revival that is start to ramp up: "Disney Interactive Studios is starting work on a new 'Tron' game at the same time it's joining the long list of companies laying off staff and consolidating development studios. A spokesperson declined to comment, but sources tell me DIS is talking to developers about a 'Tron' game that will be tied to 'TR2N,' the film sequel that its sibling studio is producing. The movie, which will star Jeff Bridges, Garret Hedlund and Olivia Wilde and be directed by Joseph Kosinski, is tentatively scheduled for 2011, which is when we can expect to see the game too. This is, of course, a no-brainer. 'Tron' was a movie about video games that spawned several successful arcade games (classics of my youth), as well as a sequel in 2003. So with a new movie coming out, what were the odds Disney was not going to do a new video game?  Nonetheless, it's exciting news to have a full-fledged new Tron coming. And it's good news that the movie is more than two years out (I'll go out on a limb and say Disney won't release it in the winter), since that means the game will have a solid amount of production time.  But it's not all light cycles and ricocheting discs at Disney Interactive. The media conglomerate's video game arm laid off almost 30 people at its Propaganda Games studio in Vancouver, maker of last year's fairly well received (I thought it was pretty good), so-so seller 'Turok.' " [Cut Scene blog, Variety]

ON THIS DATE: It was on this day in 1958 that the sixth and final season of "The Adventures of Superman" opened with an episode called "The Last Knight" which presented the Man of Steel flying in a suit of armor; it's the only time in the series that George Reeves went airborne in anything other than the hero's familiar costume. I imagine Reeves was pretty well sick of the show by that point.... To mark this modest anniversary, let's all stick to wearing our own cape today.