Stingers, shocks & impacts.
Jump scares are all about contrast. Against quiet, something loud seems even louder, so the silence before the hit matters as much as the hit itself.
Impact comes from a few things at once: something big and low, a tail, and a broad spectrum. Something subby, something punchy, something clicky, something smashy, all together. That's why trailer hits work so well, and why most of what's here is hits, stingers and impacts.
My advice: don't drop them in straight, because everyone buys the same libraries. Layer a hit with a found sound and something with pitch, and it's yours.
By Richard Pryn · Go deeper: How horror trailer music is built, act by act
A Kontakt Player instrument for thriller and horror scoring with 720 sources (including 324 jumpscares and stings, 144 tempo-synced atonal rhythms, 120 sustains and textures) and 332 presets across two engines, Psychosis Designer and Psychosis Menu.
A hybrid scoring instrument with over 2,200 sound sources and 1,200+ presets, including 780+ pads, 390+ stings, riser and hit menus, plus hit and riser 'Designers' and a Motion page for volume, pitch and pan patterns.
A cinematic percussion library with 41,395 samples from 1,596 sources and 208 presets, split across three engines: Ensemble Designer (700+ sources, five mic positions), Kit Designer (16-voice kits, 50+ kits) and Loop Designer (864 tempo-synced loops).
A creature vocal library of 3,991 sounds in 676 stereo WAV files (13.41 GB).
A library of 1,773 creature sounds in 24-bit/96 kHz WAV (3.81 GB) covering 24 types of fantasy monster, animal and insect.
A gore library of 3,390 sounds in 607 WAV files (24-bit/96 kHz, about 5.7 GB, about 160 minutes).
A semi-modular analogue drum machine made of 23 modules, with four drum channels (bass drum, bass/percussion, snare, cymbals/hi-hat), four envelope generators that can sustain into noise or drone, four trigger-event loop recorders, a shift-register random generator, an FX processor and distortion.
A jump-scare library of stingers, impacts and sharp bursts, with ready-made designed scares and a construction kit of the individual stems behind them so you can rebuild each one.
A gore library of flesh, bone, cuts, stabs, breaks and splatter, as designed sounds plus construction-kit recording sessions for building your own.
A solo violin library of extended techniques recorded dry: pizzicato swarms, ponticello sustains, ricochets and tremolos, plus 40 pads and drones and 20 FX presets.
A set of mangled, glitched percussive hits, stingers, risers, drones and dark ambiences designed by Spencer Nunamaker (Juno VHS).
A sampled waterphone in two instruments: Waterphone Phrases (366 recorded performance gestures) and Waterphone Unwrapped (playable notes with up to five harmonic layers, six articulations and water modulation), each around 3 GB with stereo and contact-mic channels.
Horror sound design made from live woodwind recordings (growls, chuffs, airy screeches, clicks), in three Kontakt instruments: a 16-step rhythm sequencer with over 700 samples, a four-layer hit and whoosh designer, and a three-layer riser designer.
A horror and thriller trailer sound design pack of 174 sounds, each with a dry version (348 WAV files, 24-bit/48 kHz): 37 hits, 25 risers, 48 signature sounds, 26 whoosh hits and 38 whooshes.
A full-orchestra ensemble library for Kontakt Player recorded in a concert hall, with pre-orchestrated string, brass, woodwind and full-orchestra patches alongside dissonant clusters, risers and orchestral effects.
A tension and horror string library recorded at Budapest Scoring with 10 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos and 3 basses, recorded as separate sections.
A phrase-based aleatoric orchestral library for Kontakt Player, with recorded atonal and dissonant performances by strings (60 players), woodwinds (19), brass (22) and percussion (3).
A Kontakt Player sound-design anthology made with ten designers, covering booms, braams, downers, drones, hits, pads, pulses, reverses, risers, soundscapes and whooshes (over 14 GB).
A horror sound-design library for full Kontakt (1.31 GB) built from 15 dark compositions, with impacts, sub hits, risers, low and high drones, and tempo-synced rhythms, tick-tocks and phrases.
Drums and percussion created with composer Charlie Clouser and recorded in a concrete-and-glass Brutalist space: 58 drums across bass drums, surdos, toms, roto-toms, darbukas, frame drums, scrap metals and snares, with over 400 performance loops at five tempos and processed 'warp' signals.
A free Musio instrument of three unusual traditional wind instruments: a femur trumpet, a trident shell and a death whistle.
A bundle of three user-guided aleatoric brass libraries designed by Casey Edwards: Low Brass (two tenor trombones, two bass trombones, tuba), French Horns (six horns) and Trumpets (three).
A cinematic sound-design library made with BOOM Library: 1,775 WAV samples at 96 kHz/24-bit (9 GB) in 47 Kontakt construction-kit instruments.
The fourth Symphobia volume: very large orchestral ensembles (10 celli and 6 basses in octaves, a 30-player low ensemble) playing risers, falls, crescendos and effects that lock to your project tempo with ProjectSAM's Adaptive Sync.
Six sample libraries made with Glitchedtones (788 samples, 300 presets), including Paranormal and Scare Tactics, that play inside FrozenPlain's free Floe plugin with three layers, granular, arpeggiators and an effects rack.
A free sample-player with over 100 horror sounds mapped one per key (screams, jump scares, creature growls, risers, horror strings and impacts), with built-in reverb, delay, chorus, distortion, high-pass filter and modulation.
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