The music of horror

What does a vampire sound like? According to Philip Glass, the undead’s aural analogue is a quivering nest of minor arpeggios, pizzicati and dramatic swoops. Glass has written a new score for one of the mothers of all horror movies, Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Glass is a name in his own right, of course, but in this, he is only the latest in a long line of film composers who have experimented with the music of fear.

Music is especially important in films that are meant to scare us because the soundtrack can slip past the intellect’s guard and act directly on the reptilian brain. Music as a powerful mood-inducer, of course, is an idea that has been around ever since early man started stretching animal skins over wooden bowls and getting off his face on qhat, and in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon earnestly discuss the possibly chaotic mental influence of certain musical scales.

Think “scary music” and you might at first imagine big, meaty soundscapes. Spidery low strings, pumping horns, banging orchestral drums and Orffish choirs. But intriguingly, Glass’s score is written for string quartet. Thanks to some studio overdubs, it can build into thrillingly rich, multilayered panic (which in next month’s live performances with the Kronos Quartet will need the addition of Glass himself at the piano), yet most of the time it is eerily intimate, more sinister than directly shocking. Its oozing sonorities blend beautifully with Lugosi’s chocolatey Hungarian accent, and the mood builds in long lines, a pulsing engine of doom.

Scary music generally takes one of three main forms: a dramatic statement of cosmic evil, a slow burn of unease and suspense, or a sudden, jarring adjunct to onscreen horror. For an example of the first method, we need look no farther than Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-winning 1977 score for The Omen, scored lavishly for a huge symphony orchestra, with massed choral shouting and Wagnerian brass spurting apocalyptic melodies. This glamorously evil, epic tune is what Satan plays at earbleed volume on his audiophile separates in his Pandaemonium Towers basement, but it does not quite scare us, precisely because it is so glorious.

Building suspense, on the other hand, requires rather more subtle and minimal forces. Take John Williams’s score for Jaws, where sawing alternated semitones on massed double basses announce that there’s something dodgy in the water long before we see what it is. Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. When the shark finally appears, the music switches to our third mode, that of intensifying visual shock: in come the horns, blaring up quite unashamedly to a good old minor sixth in sympathy with the incipient blood-cloud of the fish-food swimmer.

For sheer spine-jolt value, probably the most famous example of horror music is Bernard Herrmann’s passage of screeching violins in the shower scene of Psycho – a soundbite whose crude neek-neek-neek literalism has become a nauseatingly familiar cliché at the expense of the rest of his complex and subtle score. Herrmann himself was probably influenced by the great James Bernard, composer of such 1950s Hammer Horror classics as Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein, Quatermass and The Devil Rides Out.

Bernard himself in 1997 composed a new score for the original film version of Dracula, FW Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu. I asked him then about how a composer decides when to hold back, and when to go for the jugular. He launched salaciously into an example: “If Dracula’s approaching a victim, and there’s a lovely nubile lady in bed who’s really dying for him to come, and she’s tossing and turning and restless, and the window’s open, and she’s got the maid to come and take all the garlic flowers out of the room, suddenly you cut from her to the window, and there is Christopher Lee as Count Dracula – well, you’ve got to have a great ‘Ooh-woooah!’ at that moment,” he insisted, chuckling. “If you try to be subtle, it simply doesn’t work. If you say ‘I’m going to be very clever here’ and just have a little ‘Ee-oo-wee’, it sounds terribly weak.”

This criticism could justly be flung at Glass’s new Dracula score. It is effective to play rich, slow cadences over a shot of the vampire’s coffin opening, for instance, but sometimes the music really ought to react more tightly to the images. Later in the film, for instance, when Renfield faints at the appearance of a huge bat, the string quartet just chugs along in its arpeggiated groove as if it hasn’t actually noticed that there’s a bloodsucker in the room. You almost want to tell the musicians to get the hell out of there.

Another way to induce fear is to play with dissonance, to jolt us out of predictable harmonic comfort. Glass does this, rather by numbers, in the middle of Dracula, with scraping high notes clashing against discords in lower registers while a storm engulfs the ship that is transporting the vampire to England. Much of James Bernard’s own Hammer music, too, owed its power to his highly modernist techniques, which sounded much fresher then – percussion-and-strings instrumentation, a Stravinskian rhythmic savagery, weird Bartokian counterpoint and lushly angular melodies.

The 1950s also saw the increasing use in horror film-scores of that piece of top gear, the Theremin, whose spectral whoopings begat otherworldly terror. And as electronic music developed from this and farty old analogue synthesizers, composers gradually realised they could mess with our peace of mind in new ways. The old classical-style clichés – shivering tremolando on the strings, fast passages up and down the minor scale, and other tricks – had already been derided as old and tired back in 1947, in a book, Composing for the Films, by film composer Hanns Eisler and philosopher Theodor Adorno. With electronics, however, musicians could create entirely new sounds. A toyshop stuffed with glittering sonic pharmacopoeia was available.

One of the masters of this technique was John Carpenter, who wrote his own brooding two-finger synthesizer scores for a string of classic 1970s schlockers. The story goes that Carpenter showed an early cut, without music, of his stalk’n’slash movie Halloween to an audience who were reportedly intrigued but not at all frightened. Once the inexorable buzzy rumblings of his synth music had been added for another preview, however, there were screams from the stalls.

Fanatical musical repetition can also make an audience uncomfortable, especially if it’s on the high notes of a piano (automatically ghostly in sound) and accompanied by other strange electronic noises. We are of course talking about the splendid use of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells in The Exorcist - music to watch hurls by.

Repetition, dissonance, low strings, ethereal voices – the old tricks all still get used today on any old two-bit horror flick, but familiarity breeds contempt. Nowadays it seems that it takes more than ever really to unnerve an audience. Last year’s Pi boasted a fabulously hardcore soundtrack of industrial noise-beats with agonizing metallic samples to reproduce the chaos in its mathematician hero’s head, and the art of sound design – chucking together newly minted noises in unmusical ways – revealed its fearsome potential in David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

But where do we go from this sort of full-on ear assault? That’s easy. Just as a film can be scarier for what it doesn’t show you, so a soundtrack can be scarier for what it doesn’t play. The scores of some of the most frightening films, such as Alien, are punctuated by gaping musical blanks. You hear only footsteps walking across a grating, and you are free to imagine all sorts of unseen monstrosities. And naturally, the most frightening film of this year, The Blair Witch Project, doesn’t use any music at all apart from over the titles and credits. Silence is the worst horror of all.

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