Lord Of The Rings Orcs With 'Normal' Voices Are Somehow Scarier
Orcs, according to Saruman (Christopher Lee), were elves once, taken by the dark powers, tortured and mutilated — a terrible, ruined form of life. It's an impressive effort then, that Peter Jackson brought these walking, talking horrors to life in his adaptation of the Lord of the Rings story and made them truly terrifying. You know what would've made them really scary? If Sauron's dark forces sounded like they worked as account managers at your local bank. That's precisely the unsettling impact that's been made thanks to YouTube creator BurtBot, who compiled a great collection of clips from the beloved trilogy and gave Orcs and Uruk-hai normal voices.
Some of the film's more pivotal scenes have been made all the more disturbing thanks to these vicious soldiers sounding totally chill about smelling out man flesh. With some of the videos accumulating over 1 million views, BurtBot makes a great effort in normalizing the pretty fantastical events that unfold during Frodo's mission to destroy the One Ring. A popular entry is the "meat's back on the menu" scene from "The Two Towers," which makes the army on the run feel like a team on an office work retreat. It absolutely shouldn't work, but somehow it does.
Fans are all for Orcs having normal voices
In hindsight, the original voices for these nasty man-killers aren't really that out of the ordinary; they sound closer to Londoners than office drones in the films. The update from BurtBot certainly had a lasting effect on fans. In fact, given the different beings in Lord of the Rings, these accents may have spiced things up a bit. YouTube user @hamfranky said, "These orcs sound like they graduated [from] one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades." The adjustment impacted some fans' future enjoyment of Tolkien's beloved world, with @johnbilicki913 adding, "As a huge [T]olkien fan boy, [I] will forever read any [O]rc dialog like this from now on."
However, the alteration did freak some fans out, with @eggoXD saying, "[Okay] but somehow hearing them talk in a normal voice is scarier? 'Cause they sound sane LOL." Could a sensible orc really be scarier than one that's all about hacking up Hobbits and chowing down on their limbs (they don't need those, after all)? While it's clearly a missed opportunity for this tactic to be applied in the original trilogy, there's still a chance that it will happen in Andy Serkis' Gollum movie that's set to arrive in 2026. Now wouldn't that be precious?