October is the time to get inspired for the dark and weird. Introducing you to our favorite horror scores to inspire your frightening vlogs and productions.
Halloween time is nearly year. It’s my favorite time of year: When the leaves are changing, the pumpkins are laughing, and Jack is looking fawningly at Christmas-town. For that, I wanted to take the time to write a more personal blog.
I love horror movies and I continually try to make October a time to force my family to binge watch the genre with me (it never works). The thing I love most about a good, classic horror movie is the soundtrack though. I remember—and I think it’s true for everyone else—the sound of Hitchcock’s Psycho than any part of the story. You know the part I’m talking about. That shower scene. It would be a completely innocuous scene for a horror, and perhaps the movie itself, if not for how the music interplayed with the visuals. Say what you want about Hitchcock’s direction, it was the touch of sound that made it a true classic.
As cinematographers, we need to be aware of that audio/visual interchange in more ways than the right RCA plugs. A good cinematographer needs to understand that audio can highlight visual in significant ways. It can be the ultimate difference between a classic scene and a scene that falls epically flat. And how can we become aware of these things? By studying the work of others and seeing what works (and what fails).
So here, in the spirit of Halloween, I’ve decided to formulate a list of my favorite horror soundtracks. And I’ll have to say I’m painting “horror” here with a pretty broad brush. Watch the movies and see how the music affects you. Then pull up Smartsound Cloud, refer to our shortlist of horror albums, and see how you can augment your own cinematography that haunts even the most stoic of viewers.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
For the chilling soundtrack of the classic vampire tale, Francis Ford Coppola tapped Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, who was also the baton behind other movies like The Ninth Gate and the Pianist. The way he makes the piano dance with the strings and an ethereal choir really transport the listener into the world of darkness that is 19th century Stoker’s London/Transylvania.
Our Total Suspense album has a lot of clearly blood-sucking references in the composition if you’re looking for something similar to Kilar’s style.
Blade
Another vampire movie makes it to my list of top music. The music is laden with music that a person might not normally associate with a creature of the night. But it works, both because of the Black punk rock that is Wesley Snipes’s version of the comic character, but also because of the raw and urban visuals that the Stephen Norrington captured. Seminally, it’s the acid dripping theme by Bryce that everyone remembers, and that impacted both the horror and electronic genres.
Check out Automotive Commercial, and especially the track “Jet Flow” for something that capture Blade’s vampire-killing techno fashion. Foreboding Episodes would also be a good place to start.
Hellraiser
Ranking among one of the top horror movies of all time, Clive Barker’s masterpiece transmuted into cinematic form captured the grotesque and beautiful in ways that no other movie could. The film captures the story of a demon-possessed Rubix cube and a hard to get out stain in someone’s floor. Christopher Young composed the chilling soundtrack, which naturally wasn’t alone in his long line of horror masterpieces, which includes Pet Sematary, Flowers In The Attic, and The Gift. Below is “Resurrection”, in which Young describes in this interview with Movie Music International:
It is the same orchestra we had for the rest of the score. We had two pianos, the four French horns, low brass trombones, bass trombones, full string sections, two harps and lots of percussion. I double tracked the strings to make this cue a bigger. There were two versions of this cue. As a matter of fact, I had to redo this score. The original was my favorite which had the theme played on two pianos. Both playing the melody panned hard left and right. I just loved spreading the pianos and having this big powerhouse keyboard sound. As I recall, Clive didn’t like the pianos and wanted the bassoons playing the melody. This is the version that made it into the movie. The one that was originally recorded, which is also on the album, with the pianos. Resurrection is the one that has the pianos, and re-resurrection is the one that ended up in the movie.
It is basically the same orchestra with the second piano. Like I said, I think I may have double tracked it. Doubled the strings, doubled the French horns, doubled the brass. That’s what we would do back in those days to make a score sound bigger. Double it. Play the same parts a second time.
Our Twisted Trails album captures many of the moods that Young perfected in the Hellraiser score.
Candyman
Another Clive Barker classic, this one answers the question of if those silly highway-side urban myths are true, and there really is a bee-laden one-armed man out to kill hitchhikers with his hooked hand. Legendary minimalist composer Philip Glass handles the soundtrack here, bringing his touch to the genre of the night, and like many of the composers on this list, using the piano for its haunting effect.
The real oddity was that Glass came on board thinking that it would be an artistic re-visioning of Barker’s short story. The movie fits more into the slasher genre, but Glass’s composition propels it into another class of movie altogether.
I can’t speak for the 2021 remake, as I haven’t seen it yet, but it seems it’s following Glass’s idea a bit more. The mashup they do though of the Destiny Child song and Glass’s theme… I don’t know.
Halloween
The composer was also the director, and is one of my all-time favorite film score composers out there. John Carpenter, master of the B-movie horror and sci-fi, really nailed the score on this one, making the most eternal and recognizable soundtracks of all time (perhaps moreso than the aforementioned Psycho). Halloween follows the story of a disgruntled Captain Kirk.
Poltergeist
The marvel behind the Poltergeist soundtrack is the main theme. At the time, Spielberg’s go-to composer John Williams was busy with E.T., so he contracted Jerry Goldsmith to do the scoring for his not-actually-directed movie. While Goldsmith sets the creepy mood with the alternating Shepard’s tones pretty early, it’s the theme that really cranks it up. It’s such a peaceful and dancing-in-the-fields-on-a-sunny-day fairy tale type track. Yet serving as the main theme here, and the motif that is constantly called back to, only further raises the tension and darkness underlying the movie.
For dark music that hearkens to lighter themes, start with our Thrilling Trailer album.
It Follows
The sequel to the updated version of Stephen King’s killer clowns from outer space story, the score for It Follows, composed by Disasterpiece, is a direct callback to John Carpenter’s seminal synthwave-godfather style. Which is appropriate, because the movie is about the grown-up versions of the kids who lived out their original clownophobia in the 80s and whose childhood fears have come back to haunt them worse than their memories of puberty.
Stranger Things
Toying with time in the same ways that It Follows, and doing it first, the Stranger Things theme composed by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein uses their tracks to both timestamp the story and to create an instant tension. Stranger Things follows the story of a disgruntled girl with government issues and an exaggerated arachnophobia, who makes some new friends and attempts to play games with them before being kidnapped by a grizzly police officer and locked in a cabin in the woods.
Look to our Wave & Vice for a synthwave filled album that can bring out the 80s in any movie. Start with the track “Blood Dawn” for a darker vibe.
Trick ‘R Treat
A brilliant but gory anthology piece about people who love the holiday of Halloween just a bit too much, the score by Douglas Pipes, who jumps around in his influences by most of the composers I’ve mentioned on this list. He was blessed by a director who loves film scoring even though both were cursed by a production company that didn’t. The director, Michael Dougherty, decided to front his own funds to bring in an 85-piece orchestra to bring Pipes’s music to life.
Overlord
What’s not to like about WWII Allied heroes shooting up zombie Nazis? A movie accentuated by the tones of John Carpenter or Vangelis. For some reason, Jed Kurzel chose the 80s for his go-to sounds, but it works well in this modern Nazi-sploitation film. To be fair many parts of the soundtrack do sound a bit like Kilar’s works, who has also dealt heavily with WWII-themed films.
Our Sci-Fi Noir album has a lot of dark, genre-bending tracks to fill out your out-of-time thrillers.
