Horror film score
A horror film score is music used and often specially written for films in the horror genre.
History
Early sound film scores included little music. Universal Studios was among several studios that had a policy of no music under their dialogue, which they felt interfered with it.Template:Sfn What little music existed in early sounds films from the studio consisted of a combination of original compositions, classical music, and published music which had been composed for use accompanying silent films.Template:Sfn In early 1931, Paramount Pictures initiated the idea of scoring films from beginning to end with music, other studios followed, including Universal creating a fully fledged score for Frankenstein (1931).Template:Sfn Just as Universal tended to reuse similar characters, actors and writers for their horror films, they also did so with their music, often using the same music again and again in film in their series.Template:Sfn
Film journalist and musician Stephen Thrower stated that following Bernard Herrmann's score to Psycho (1960), horror film soundtracks have rarely been mere background music, noting that James Bernard's music for horror film productions by Hammer have been "gallopingly melodramatic, although one has to say it often raises more giggles than goosebumps".Template:Sfn
Neil Lerner, in his book Music in the Horror Film, found that stylistically, the genre allowed for greater freedom for composers to experiment with harmony and instrumentation.Template:Sfn Approaches in the 1960s and 1970s included work from Ennio Morricone, who Thrower described as bringing "shuddering, paranoiac quality" based around jazz, electronic effects and "rampant atonal twanging" to films by Dario Argento, Aldo Lado and Lucio Fulci.Template:Sfn A short lived trend in the 1970s was for progressive rock scores in horror films following the release of The Exorcist (1973) with "Tubular Bells". Italian progressive rock band Goblin contributed to several scores for Argento, about whom Thrower stated that "like Morricone, they occasionally gave brilliant work to dumb movies" noting their scores to Spasmo and Contamination.Template:Sfn The shades of progressive rock were also found in other American productions, such as Carpenter's Halloween, with its main theme having the piano tap out five beats to the bar.Template:Sfn
Thrower found that by the 1990s, horror film soundtracks were "stuffed with pop and rock in the hope that the album might shift enough units to reach the charts.", noting the popular success of the soundtrack to Flashdance.Template:Sfn
See also
References
Sources
Template:Horror film Template:Horror fiction
This article incorporates text from the Wikipedia article "Horror film score", available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.Retrieved 2026-03-03.