A short history of horror music, from silent films to today

So what is horror music? First thing I want to point out is that it’s a lot broader than you’d think. It’s not just terrifying, brown trousers music. It’s also the slightly quirky, dark Danny Elfman vibe, or a waltz for vampires dancing in a ballroom. If it creates unease, or sets a scene or mood that belongs in the horror genre, it counts.

And what makes it scary? For me it comes down to tension, mood and the unsettling, and most of that comes from combining ingredients that don’t get on. Two notes that clash. Two instruments from different worlds. A child’s toy in a dark room.

None of that came from nowhere. Every horror cue you write today is built on a vocabulary that’s been growing for well over a century. Here’s a quick tour, and what you can steal from each stop.

The classical canon: where the vocabulary starts

For centuries, composers have been obsessed with writing music about death, the macabre and all things sinister about being human. The best of it ended up in the classical canon, and you’ll recognise a lot of it straight away:

• In the Hall of the Mountain King, Edvard Grieg
• Danse macabre, Camille Saint-Saëns
• Toccata and Fugue in D minor, traditionally credited to J.S. Bach
• Night on Bald Mountain, Modest Mussorgsky

Not all of these are about death exactly, but they’re about the darker side of things. And they’ve filled our heads with what “sinister” sounds like.

Silent films and the mood books

Here’s how that happened. When silent films were shown, they were usually accompanied live, often by a pianist or an organist in the cinema. To help those players match the music to the picture rather than just improvise, publishers put out collections of music sorted by mood.

The most famous is Ernő Rapée’s Motion Picture Moods, from 1924. I used to have a copy. You’d open it up and there’d be a page for battle, a page for romance, a page for evil. Flick to the right page and play.

A lot of what’s in those books came from the classical canon. Night after night, in cinema after cinema, the same pieces were played over the same kinds of scenes. That’s a big part of why, when someone wants to portray a vampire, an organ starts playing that toccata. We still do it to this day.

What to take from it: your listener already has a library of horror associations in their head. You can lean on it or deliberately twist it.

Then there was Herrmann

And then there was Bernard Herrmann. You could do an entire course on his music, and to be honest I’d be a bit out of my depth going super deep. But here’s what I know.

Herrmann came up through radio, as a conductor and composer at CBS, and made his way into film with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane. He went on to score a run of Alfred Hitchcock films, including Vertigo and Psycho. Psycho is the one everyone knows: a score for strings only, with those shrieking, repeated stabs in the shower scene.

What’s useful for us isn’t the orchestra. We don’t all have one (well, we do, in the form of samples). It’s what he was communicating. Herrmann was fascinated by modern classical and atonal music, and a lot of what he does is built on atonal devices and chromatic lines. I find his music “not disjointed but disorientating”, and that’s exactly why it works so beautifully.

Try this: write a short cue for a string patch only. Pick one dissonant chord, repeat it as hard, short stabs, then let a chromatic line slide underneath. No melody needed.

The 70s and 80s: small budgets, big ideas

Jump forward to the 70s and 80s, and a lot of the most famous horror films were made for not very much money. The music budget is usually one of the first things to suffer. But less money didn’t mean less creativity. I truly believe limitations enhance creativity, and this period proves it.

A few scores I keep going back to:

• Halloween (1978). John Carpenter directed it and wrote the score himself. That piano theme in 5/4 is creepy without being dissonant at all. I love how he reuses the main idea: take a motif, transpose it down a semitone, keep going. The track feels like it’s moving forward, and you don’t have to come up with any new ideas.
• The Exorcist (1973). Its famous theme is the opening of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, a keyboard pattern in an unusual, lopsided meter. Proof that an odd time signature can do the creeping for you.
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Effects and found sound creating something ominous that’s barely “music” at all. Terrifying, and brilliant.
• Day of the Dead (1985). Rich, big synth sounds, from a time when that technology was still fairly new.
• Child’s Play (1988). A more classic score, but with really creative percussion. It sounds like someone having a great time with some sticks in a kitchen. And it works.

Not every budget was cut, mind. Jerry Goldsmith was writing big orchestral horror scores like The Omen at the same time. But the synth, piano and found-sound vocabulary of this era is still everywhere. Just listen to Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s Stranger Things score.

Try this: give yourself one free synth, such as Surge XT or Vital, plus a piano. Write a four-note ostinato in 5/4, put a warm synth-strings pad under it, then move the whole thing down a semitone every four bars.

Modern horror: the melting pot

Modern horror is a huge melting pot of everything that’s come before. You still get full orchestral scores. You get subtle, eerie sound design. You get the cluster-filled sound that runs from Ligeti, whose music Kubrick used in The Shining, through films like The Conjuring. You hear the classical canon, 80s synths and modern trailer horror all in there. I’ve been lucky enough to have my trailer music used for films like The Conjuring 2, The Nun II and The Lodge, and they’re all different flavours of horror.

We can basically do whatever we want, as long as it creates the mood. Brilliant. But it brings two problems:

1. Option overwhelm. There’s so much to choose from that you never actually choose. It’s like scrolling Netflix for half an hour and watching nothing. Or decision fatigue sets in, and your creativity just gets sapped.
2. Lack of originality. You’d think more tools would mean everyone sounds different. What actually happens is we all buy the same tools and find the same cool sounds. I listen to a trailer and go, “Oh, I know that sample.”

The real lesson from history: limitations

Look back over all of it. The classical canon and the mood books gave us a vocabulary. Low budgets in the 70s and 80s gave us another one. The best scores, to my mind, are the ones with a limitation, whether it was imposed on the composer or chosen.

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for Chernobyl is a great example: she recorded sounds in a decommissioned nuclear power plant and built from that palette. Fantastic.

My own was simple. I can’t really play a stringed instrument, but I wanted that sound, so I recorded myself playing badly, close up. Out of tune and imperfect, and that became part of my sound.

So pick yours:

• Just use one synth.
• Just use found sounds.
• Just use atonal theory.
• Just use your voice.

Wrapping up

Horror music has always been shaped by its limits: a pianist with a mood book, Herrmann with a string section, Carpenter with a synth and a piano. Learn the vocabulary each era left us, then give yourself a limitation of your own and build your voice from it.

Happy composing! Rich