I’ll be the first person to admit that my love of horror movies, though passionate, is somewhat idiosyncratic. I love horror movies both good and okay, but only if they stay within certain boundaries: I will watch any big budget serial killer movie, but not a half-assed one. I am untroubled by the children-in-peril trope but I won’t watch if it is animals. I'll watch any zombie movie, save for Zombi 2 (which features a toothless shark "fighting" with an underwater zombie who has just sexually assaulted a topless female scuba diver; too depressing.) Aside from being a movie goer with admittedly questionable taste, I’m also a musicologist, which means I at least try to pay attention to what’s going on in the scores and soundtracks of these films.
While scary movie scores are sometimes predictably stupid (a music box slowly winding down; cheap “mickey-mousing” where the score goes BOO! when a ghost jumps out.) At their most effective, it makes a frightening movie that much more so. In honor of Halloween, let's examine some of the ways scary movies scare us with music.
Godzilla (2014)
There’s a rich tradition in movies of fitting pre-existing music to cinematic images: you can’t think of the monolith from 2001 without hearing Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in your head; the haunting use of Ligeti in the recent Godzilla reboot is the main thing that makes the scene so awesome. I realize it may be a bit of a stretch to refer to “Godzilla” as a “scary movie” but this is my show and if you don’t like it you can get the hell out.
Dang! In my house this movie is referred to as “Avant-Gardezilla.”
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Scary movies are also rife with the diegetic use of pre-existing music as well ("diegetic" means the music is actually happening in the plot of the film, like when a character turns on a radio or sings a song). A prime example: in Silence of the Lambs Hannibal Lecter "uses" the elegant, mathematical precision of the Aria from J.S. Bach’s "Goldberg Variations" as a means of underscoring his intellectual superiority, while poor old Buffalo Bill dances to poor old one-hit-wonder Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye Horses.” These musical choices foreshadow which of the two serial killers will ultimately triumph (hint: it won’t be the working-class one).
In the end [SPOILER!], one of these dreadful monsters will be killed in his kitschy Midwestern home, but we will sort of like and respect the other, with his line drawings of the Duomo seen from the Belvedere. After all, to paraphrase a "Simpsons" episode, no one who loves Bach could be an evil man.
There is also music whose creep-factor is based on mindless repetition that becomes scarier and scarier over time.
Psycho (1960)
There is a lot to like about the theme from Psycho. That screeching glissando repeats itself, never progressing or developing. It’s as though the music is an aural mirror of Norman himself, trapped in his weird Oedipal mother-lover stabby-murder loop. Another example is the theme from Jaws. It’s simply a minor second ostinato in the low strings of the orchestra, repeated incessantly, whenever the shark (who in my house is referred to as "Josh") is about to chomp somebody. Jaws-theme composer John Williams is well-associated with epically melodramatic, Wagnerian character themes—Darth Vader, Indiana Jones—but this one is so utterly basic that Spielberg himself described it as “stupid.” Void of any significant melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or even dynamic content, the theme—like Josh itself—can only repeat the same action again and again until stopped by some outer force. It’s a musical evocation of mindless repetition—the quality that makes a shark, or Norman Bates in stabby “Mother” mode, so scary.
Repetition at the macro level can be even scarier, though. I’m thinking of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), in which the unfuckwithable Robert Mitchum, playing a preacher, marries and murders Shelly Winters, and then chases her two children, John and Pearl, seemingly all the way across Depression-era America, because they have their dead father’s bank robbery money hidden in a doll named Miss Jenny. The Night of the Hunter has a great score by Walter Schumann and a lot of genuinely creepy diegetic musical cues, but probably none is so effective as the hymn—“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”—which Mitchum sings throughout in his rich baritone.
With each repetition, this hymn becomes more and more frightening. You start associating the constancy and everlastingness of Jesus’s arms with those of Robert Mitchum, so much bigger and stronger than the spindly arms of the two poor orphans he’s terrorizing. The hymn also becomes a musical hallmark that lets you know whenever he is near, as in the long, gorgeous riverboat scene that ends with John awakening from his uneasy sleep in a hayloft, only to hear the hymn echoing across the barren moonlit field. We hear Mitchum before we see him; when his silhouette appears, riding a horse methodically across the horizon, it gives us a supernatural chill. As John despairingly says: "Don’t he never sleep?"
Repetition thus transforms the hymn from something infinitely familiar and comforting into something horrifying and alien; a classic terror narrative.
Suspiria (1977)
Finally, let us turn to Italian prog rock band Goblin’s soundtrack for Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece, Suspiria—one of the great horror soundtracks on this earth. This film is notable for being the only exception I make to my "nothing involving animals" rule, as it does have one very brief, but memorable, scene involving a haunted German Shepherd.
Here is a musical theme whose emotional content is built out of the incessant repetition of a very simple combination of melodic and rhythmic elements, but which itself recurs again and again throughout the entire duration of the film.
What is it about this theme that makes your skin crawl? It’s got a pretty complex texture (mandolin, tabla, drums, crazy experimental washes of synth noise, echoing hateful whispers, bells) even though the rest of its content is very simple. Like the themes from Jaws or Psycho, it never develops musically or harmonically in any way, but, unlike those themes, it has its own perfect circular logic, like a snake eating its own tail—almost as though it can’t develop or progress, like it’s musically evoking the feeling of being immobilized (like when you fall into a room inexplicably filled with barbed wire, for example, which is something that happens in this movie). The theme takes on an unhealthy, hypnotic effect, similar to the one experienced by the film’s heroine, Suzy, as she is mesmerized and drugged by the coven of witches she thinks are her ballet teachers.
There are so many more that I did not have the room to discuss, and that I wish I were watching right now instead of doing work. Luckily, it’s almost Halloween, and in my world that means eating a lot of Doritos and watching a lot of Mario Bava films while making spiced wine in the slow cooker. If I have left you with anything today, I truly hope it is a newly burning desire to pay attention to and be deeply frightened by the scores of the films you watch, and to mock and belittle the ineffective scores until your throat is sore. May creepy string tremolos and upsetting dissonant chords haunt your dreams on this night, and all nights to come!