Why We're Not Afraid to Love Scary Music (Plus 13 of the Best Horror Film Scores)

Acclaimed Goosebumps author R.L. Stine recently said on the Chicago Humanities Tapes podcast that scaring kids was never his goal. In fact, he was surprised when his young readers told him that they actually enjoyed being freaked out by his stories. “[Kids] like to be scared when they know they’re safe at the same time,” Stine realized. “When they know they’re in their room reading, they’re out there fighting these monsters, but they know they’re home safe.”

Children aren’t the only ones looking to be scared as a form of entertainment, as is evident by the countless horror films that plumb the depths of our fears and darkest imaginations. As central to the most iconic scary movies as figures like Jason, Freddie Krueger, and Hannibal Lecter, are the film scores that heighten the fear factor.

The shrieking strings in Psycho, the pulse-quickening bass line from Jaws—these scores function like any film soundtrack in that they add to the emotional experience of the visuals. But horror film scores also have the critical job of reminding us of the most important part: that what we’re seeing isn’t real.

Ryan Page (he/they), assistant professor of electronic production and design (EPD), says that horror media allows us to explore the darker side of humanity, but from a safe distance. “So that's something that I would never want to see in real life, right? I would never want to be trapped in a house with zombies, you know, pounding at the door,” Page says. Music, they continue, is “one of those things that allows [the horror] to be a thought, to be unreal, and I think that that can be a very kind of exciting place to be in.” In fact, as he points out, the viewer has signed up for this experience. “They bought the ticket, they're ready to take their ride, they want to be sort of toyed with a little bit,” he says.

As an electronic music composer, Page often works on sound design for digital media, including audio work on The Sims 4: Get Famous expansion pack, and has collaborated with artists such as Laetitia Sonami, Pauline Oliveros, Anna Friz, Rhys Chatham, and Ikue Mori. Under their current artist name Repairer of Reputations, Page frequently works on horror-related media, with this October being particularly prolific for them in this area. They released part one of The Path of Veins, an interactive visual horror novel that they wrote, programmed, and scored. They also released the latest installment of an annual project titled October Country, where they cover a selection of their favorite horror film scores and releases them as a free download on Bandcamp—but only available during the month of October.

Listen to a piece from Ryan Page's score for The Path of Veins, Part 1:

The Best Scary Music Is Also a Little Pretty

Page’s interest in horror film scores began as a teenager after he picked up a DVD copy of Dario Argento's 1977 horror film Suspiria (incidentally, he was attending Berklee’s Five-Week summer program at the time). Even as he realized the film was one of the scariest he’d ever seen, he couldn’t stop thinking about the soundtrack and how anyone could write music like this.

To make music sound scary and interesting is a unique challenge, as it’s not just about picking the most atonal textures or dissonant notes and slapping them together. Ironically, to make something memorably ugly, it has to have an air of pleasantness.

Take the theme from John Carpenter’s Halloween.

On its own, the theme is pretty in its simple, minor-key melody, which isn’t surprising given that Carpenter scored the film himself despite not having any formal musical training. What makes the piece so haunting is this simplicity plus a metronomic thumping set within an odd time signature (in this case, 10/8 or “complex 5/4” time). “You have this pattern that's repeating in a way that feels slippery. . . . It creates a kind of tension,” Page says.

Jungmin Lee, assistant professor in the Screen Scoring Department, explains that "Simple meters like 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 would give [a film] scene a stable feeling.” But in a horror film, odd meters such as 5/8, 7/8, and 7/4 have a shifting quality. They’re “a little unpredictable and make us feel uncomfortable," she says.

Watch Jungmin Lee give tips on how to score a scene from a horror film:

Haunted By the Past

The overall effect on the listener/viewer is that your grip on reality starts to slip just a little bit, and things start to feel surreal or uncanny—that is, things feel both real and unreal at the same time. The term "uncanny" is a concept that comes from the German word unheimlich, which translates to “not from the home," but, according to how psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud discussed the term, it can also mean something hidden within the home (or within the familiar).

Combine the uncanny with the idea of nostalgia, and you start to get closer to why things like ghosts and zombies can be so scary. “If you think about the semantic origins of [nostalgia], it also means homesickness,” Page says.

Nostalgia and homesickness are about longing for something familiar that has been lost. We typically think of nostalgia as a pleasant feeling, reminiscing about the bygone, wistful days of youth. But people also talk about being “haunted by the past,” and as Page says, “nostalgia is, in its own way, quite frightening, and . . . so much of the horror film plays on that.”

Are ghosts real? Who knows, but what is a ghost in a practical sense if not the past—the things we have lived through that now only visit us in our minds. Horror films and scary music are simply helping those ghosts come out to play.

Listen to a playlist of some of the best horror film musical themes, as curated by Ryan Page: