Original subtitles

In a horror movie, more than any other kind

of movie, you're laying the groundwork for what's to come.

And music is such an important part of impending doom

and laying the tracks for the train that's going

to crash into your victim.

I learned from John Carpenter

what a director view is of the score.

He says that music is the director's velvet glove.

That's how you touch people without them

knowing you're touching them.

You're never going to accomplish what

is potential with a horror film without a, literally,

killer score.

It is everything to an effective horror film.

So what are the essential horror film scores?

In 1933, when King Kong was made,

music was just a flavor enhancer.

King Kong and the Max Steiner score kind of created what

a horror movie score could be.

Steiner was kind of one of the first

to really use leitmotifs in film scores.

Instead of just having little bits of music, the opening title

and the end credit, and then little cues during the movie,

Steiner wrote a ton of music on King Kong.

And it's leitmotific and themes associated with different moods

and characters in a very similar way

that Wagner was doing in his operas.

'33 was very early to have

wall-to-wall music, and especially

with a giant orchestra.

But Steiner was one of the greats.

You know, this was a very early monster movie,

a giant gorilla movie.

And just the sense of adventure, first, on Skull Island--

The eighth wonder of the world.

But then eventually bringing Kong to New York

and putting him on display, and the buildup of tension

that he creates before Kong escapes--

and the explosive release when he does

is something that had never been done before and started

to be copied quite a bit.

This explosive experience of sical devastation in King Kong

was quite game changing.

I think that it really influenced

the visual style of these films because they were

able to be supported by music and not

feel that they had to rely only on the performance.

So you got a lot less of these close-ups

that just sort of sat there for what seemed like minutes--

because there was no score.

There was no way to say, no, now you must be very scared,

or, you know, now this is a suspenseful moment.

As I said before, I say again, here's--

here's to a son to the House of Frankenstein.

Indeed, sir.

We hope so, sir.

In 1931 when Frankenstein came out,

you have the music over the credits

and virtually nothing else throughout the film.

But by the time of the sequel in 1935,

there was a full orchestral score

by Franz Waxman that is absolutely stunning

and surely was influenced by Max Steiner's score for King Kong.

The movies were just discovering how they could so

masterfully pair a film score--

--with a trauma or a story being told.

And so Franz Waxman and Max Steiner

were two of the greats who really laid the foundation

for what was going to come.

It is subjective, and it's subjective in the mind

of the monster.

Music makes sure that, from the very, very beginning,

you understand there's another side to this creature that

is relatable.

It guides you in very sweet ways,

and it sort of takes the edge off of what you thought

you were there to experience.

And I think that it holds a unique place

still to this day in the history of film scores,

because Franz Waxman was a composer who really

understood how to thread that needle between the poetic

and the creepy.

But it's a very witty score at times,

but it's also very sinister and very, very atmospheric.

But of course, the moment where it

launches into just pure genius is the birth of the bride.

The bride of Frankenstein.

And you hear those wedding bells

chiming on the soundtrack.

And it's, like, I can only imagine,

back in the '30s, how audiences must have felt when they saw

that scene, because it still, to this day,

kind of just lifts you out of your seat

a little bit and you're just like, wow, that's so cool.

But it's such an obvious musical flourish.

It's not trying to just be underscore.

It's like the score is part of the character

of the movie at that point.

So people will say a great film score is something

that you don't notice.

Uh-uh, sorry.

A great film score is something like, when it sings like that,

you have to notice it.

And there's no way that you couldn't.

And I can't imagine it being scored any other way

after you've watched it like that, because it's

an absolutely perfect touch.

It's very romantic.

And that's what's interesting about the pre-war horror,

is that it has a lot more romance it seems than Hitchcock

and later horror films.

There's something about the kind of longing operatic quality

to those early horror films that are very, very different

style to post-war horror.

Bernard Hermann started out scoring

radio plays for Orson Welles.

Then Welles hired him to score his first feature--

Citizen Kane.

Rosebud.

And that kind of made his name.

He scored these great sci-fi scores in the '50s with

these novel instruments.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, there's

tons of brass and percussion and harps,

and then there's this theremin wailing on it.

And it's amazing.

It's an amazing sound.

It's an amazingly original kind of instrumentation.

Gort, Klaatu barada nikto.

But he was just pushing

the envelope with what he had, and he wanted new sounds.

And he was trying to create new effects,

and then went on to start scoring

Hitchcock's films, which brought him

to a different level musically.

Hitchcock had been making

full-color, big-screen movies for years,

and he decided to make a black and white movie.

And when he and Bernard Hermann met about scoring the film,

he wanted a black and white score.

So that meant stripping the orchestra of its brass

and its percussion and its woodwinds

and just playing with strings.

There's no way you

can listen to that film score and not

feel the violence behind it.

It's impossible to overestimate

he impact of the Psycho score.

It's kind of the template for any horror score

that came after it.

That score is just constantly just sort of breathing

right down the back of your neck,

so you're never really at ease, even when she's

just driving down the road.

The slashing of the windshield wipers, you know,

it's like it's always just perfectly in time

with the movie.

The scene where Norman Bates is with Marion in the parlor

of the hotel reception and they're

having this conversation, and then suddenly, the conversation

turns to the madhouse.

And Marion says--

Wouldn't it be better if you put her--

someplace?

You mean an institution, a madhouse?

And then suddenly the music comes in,

and you know something is not right with Norman.

And the music is doing all of that.

Put her in some place.

I'm sorry.

I didn't mean it to sound uncaring.

Anthony Perkins's acting is pretty impeccable in that scene

as well, but the music is really telling the audience

something's amiss here.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

Haven't you?

What Hermann was doing, he was taking a minor chord

but then adding another note.

So for instance, in Psycho, he's got what's

called a minor major chord--

Which in an altered form is also the vertigo chord.

And that gives a sort of weird edge

to that tonality that can go in so many different ways.

Originally, the shower scene was supposed

to have no music, which--

thank, God-- Hermann prevailed on that one

and stuck to his guns, because the music

really does just absolutely spring

to life during that sequence.

The way it screams during the murder scenes,

you know, these--

it became iconic.

Psycho is still one of the most explosive and dangerous

film scores of all time.

Completely recognizable and imitated, but unmatched.

Hey, watch out, lady!

1968 brought Rosemary's Baby.

Here was Roman Polanski getting an opportunity

to do a big studio movie for the first time.

What I love about the Rosemary's Baby score

is that it plays against horror for lots of it.

I mean, it's very sweet and very pretty,

especially the main theme.

La, la, la, la,

La, la, la, la, la, la

La, la, la

That main theme sounds like musical Prozac.

La, la, la, la,

La, la, la, la, la, la

La, la, la

It lulls you into lowering your defenses

and then hits you with the horror.

It makes the audience more vulnerable.

And that score, it's so satanic.

This is no dream.

This is really happening.

It's about possession.

But it's not treated like a horror film.

It's treated like a big studio drama.

The performances are great.

The script is great.

It's based on a great book by Ira Levin.

But the cherry on the sundae was the score.

Polanski brought along a Polish composer

that he already knew and had worked with.

Rosemary's treated like a child throughout the film,

and the lullaby is definitely a recurring theme.

But the music for Rosemary, her themes are very adult.

They are canny.

They are knowing.

It's kind of fighting that rock-a-bye baby feel.

She knows there's something wrong.

Nobody else will admit to it.

But the music knows something is wrong too,

and it's on Rosemary's side.

And it's expressing those things that usually

can only be expressed in a book or being

read to or with narration.

But we know what's going on in her mind,

because the madness of this music is so propulsive.

That was the era of, you know, antidepressants emerging

and people who were living unfulfilled lives, especially

women, who were being gaslit by the patriarchy, kind of popping

pills to make it through.

What have you done to it?

What have you done to its eyes?

He has his father's eyes.

That movie is somewhat of a metaphor for that--

for being gaslit by society.

And so, I think the score functions in that same way.

La, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la, la

La, la, la

Takemitsu Toru is an incredible composer--

and worked across genres.

There's no comparison to what he did,

not just in his composition, but, in his way,

he understood the relationship between cinema and music.

Near Dark, It's really a classic score.

It really drives the movie, which is a really well-made

movie in the first place.

But it just feels grim and dark and brooding,

and it's amplified by the throbbing

electronics of Tangerine Dream.

Candyman, I think, is just an incredible score,

because it takes the Philip Glass sound, especially that

pumping organ sound that he does so well

in which we associate with him.

That dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.

And that music alone is enough to just really sort of freak you

out, because you can feel that sort of thing

is simmering behind the walls and behind the mirrors,

you know.

That it's always just right there

and it could jump out at any time.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, they're

using one part of the music to move us forward,

to propel us through the story.

And the other part is this undercurrent of dread

that's coming through, and it just

builds up throughout the film.

Go slowly.

They're moving us through the story.

And then we get to this really horrific moment,

and they fucking kill us with it.

This is a film that's

about a fake film in which you and our protagonist

get lost in the madness of that soundscape.

And Broadcast, who created that sonic world,

achieved something in collaboration

with the filmmaker that is really

special, really unnerving.

Jaws is an example

of how the music can actually become a character

in the movie itself.

I don't think anyone's ever forgotten the first time they

watched it and just those opening

credits and the first time you heard that dun, dun,

dun, dun, dun, you know, the camera

just gliding through the water.

You always feel like the shark could attack at any minute

because you've always got that music sort of driving you.

Hey, you guys.

I feel like Jaws

is the next blockbuster iteration of what

Hermann did with Psycho.

It's also employing a very simple ostinato in a similar way

what Hermann did with Psycho.

When I think of Jaws, I think of being a kid and everybody

in the swimming pool putting their shark fins up and singing

the Jaws theme song.

He made me do it.

It's so simple that a five-year-old can sing it.

You always hear the story that John Williams

just played a couple notes--

the classic notes of the theme.

That's all it took.

It has to be able to work on a very simple level.

You know, a really great composer

doesn't need a full orchestra to communicate

or express what the larger finished score

is going to sound like.

He should be able to play a sketch of it that really

captures the spirit and the essence

of what the finished score is going

to eventually grow to become.

John Williams, of course, is also expert

at doing adventure music.

That's why it's also such a thrilling

film to watch because it isn't all just scary.

Like, when they're out on the water together,

he does a beautiful adventure music.

Bring another barrel!

I'm coming around again!

But it's no wonder that John Williams

got his first original score Oscar for this movie.

And that really kind of changed everything,

because after that, it set the stage for Close

Encounters, Star Wars, Raiders.

All of that stuff would never have happened

without the score for Jaws.

How about this, John Williams?

You've created a score that becomes

synonymous with music the same way

that some of Beethoven's music is, you know.

That's pretty wild.

What is the sound of music?

Maybe you'd go like nah, nah, nah, nah.

And then it was like, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, like, for release

or something like that.

But then, I think Jaws is a major example of that, right?

Who doesn't know it?

Show me somebody.

Smile you son of a--

Jerry Goldsmith is probably my personal favorite composer.

What I love about him is, he was one of the practitioners that

took 12 tone music that was popularized

in the 20th century and brought it into the world of film.

Planet of the Apes, for me, is the ultimate Goldsmith's score.

He had to create a new sound world for this new world

that we are experiencing, and he decided to, first of all,

find the wackiest percussion instruments he could find.

He's using conch shells from India.

He's using a bass slide whistle.

He's using mixing bowls.

The percussionist, Emil Richards,

was always creating new instruments

and showing them to Jerry, and just would try anything.

These cool percussion instruments

makes it sound like prehistoric music,

and it's incredibly effective.

The Omen is completely different.

Jerry Goldsmith's score to The Omen is

one of the all-time greats, not just in horror,

but in all cinema.

That score is so phenomenally good, I get goosebumps

every time I watch that movie.

The main theme, Ave Satunus, to me,

it's like the Star Wars theme.

I don't know if anyone has actually seen it.

But you haven't lived until you've

actually watched interpretive dancing

to Ave Satani at the Oscars.

Yes, they did do that, honestly.

The approach seems so simple.

It's a perversion of religious chanting

that it takes what you would normally think of as choral

chanting that you would hear in mething like The Robe or Ten

Commandments or whatever.

And he makes it completely diabolical.

The voices just sound malicious.

It's like you have this choir chanting,

but they sound really ticked off.

It's the soundtrack that gets stuck in your head.

It has lyrics to it, which you don't quite understand.

But you can just about make out that they're

about Satan and evil, and it's just creepy enough.

But it's also kind of bombastic.

It helps create a mythology around that kid,

around the events of the Antichrist, which could have

been a very contained family unit story,

but it's supposed to have ripples for the entire world,

because the child that you watch growing

is going to be the Antichrist, who is going to rule the world

and possibly destroy it.

The film becomes

also surprisingly emotional.

It's about family.

It's about love.

Sometimes you just can't save the ones you love.

And sometimes the ones you love maybe

aren't the ones that you should be saving.

The score never tips it out of the main character's

perception of things, and that is extraordinary.

And more rare than not, even with great scorers,

who have great themes, it's a thinking man's score,

especially for a horror film.

It adds those levels.

No, Daddy, no.

God, help me.

Police!

Stop!

Stop or I'll fire!

In a horror film, you have the luxury

of being able to experiment and to go places that are not

the average direction you would take

to be more aggressive in your use of musical instruments.

And the winner is--

Jerry Goldsmith for The Omen.

Jerry Goldsmith and just the variety of things

that he did, the aggressive nature of his instrumentation

in some of these films--

you go to a certain level in one movie,

and your next movie you think, maybe I'll

go a little further this time, and the next one even a little

further, especially if it becomes influential.

I think his style really

lent itself well to Alien.

He had established the use of Echoplex,

which is a tape-based delay on a film

that he did earlier, Patton.

And that was used again on the Alien score.

And he originally wrote a much more lush, romantic, beautiful

theme for the main titles, and then Scott, the director,

insisted on using a more dissonant piece.

That crap's going to eat through the hull.

I think it's going to eat through the goddamn hull.

Come on.

It was Jerry Goldsmith's score,

but they threw out a lot of his new stuff

and put in music he'd written for Freud for the John Huston

movie, which nobody liked.

But the music was great.

And I can't imagine two more different movies

utilizing that same score.

I think he does use the didgeridoo

and the alien score, and then also combined instruments

from other cultures.

And because those elements were not necessarily

familiar to moviegoers in the United States at the time,

they really did sound, you know, extraterrestrial.

It really has an instantly identifiable texture.

No!

I think a great film score is one that obviously has

a unifying theme that kind of holds the film together

but also tells its own story.

Suspiria is one of my favorite movies.

And Goblin did the soundtrack for that.

It's about a girl who goes to a dance academy

and there's a coven of witches there.

Nothing prepared me for Suspiria.

The music was this blasting, terrifying prog

rock with whispers and paranoid--

really made you terrified.

It feels almost like a silent movie score

but by a rock band, because it has this liveness to it.

It's not super precise in lots of areas.

That element is very exciting.

It feels a bit unhinged.

You're not sure what to expect.

It doesn't feel like they went through with the slide ruler

and timed out every single scene.

It felt like they were really in there playing to picture.

I'm not sure if that's how they actually did it,

but that's certainly how it feels.

In Suspiria, the horror is like not

a lot of chasing around.

A lot of it's like atmospheric walking down dark hallways.

When she walks down and the cleaning lady turns the mirror

and it flashes on her like--

The breaths of the Suspiria score

make you feel like you're in the belly of the school.

The school is this entity, and you're caught inside of it.

And you can't escape it.

And then you have the scary action chase scenes with

the pounding, thundering music.

Argento was actually blasted on the set

to get people in the mood.

The scene with Stefania Casini, where

she's sort of being pursued down the hallway

and she winds up in the barbed wire

room, that whole sequence, what he would do

is, right before they'd start--

you know, before they'd yell action on the set,

all of a sudden, he'd be like--

And so, to make people kind of look like that,

that's because of the music that was already written.

And so he already knew in his head

what this thing was going to be doing to you.

Hello?

The first time I met John Carpenter,

I was interviewing him for a magazine,

and I met him at this tiny little studio in Hollywood,

where it's just him and his keyboard,

and he was scoring Halloween.

We had no idea what that was going to become.

He's brilliant at imple themes, hence Halloween.

Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

I mean, kids come up to me-- because they

know I was part of Halloween-- to show

me that they could play it. It's like the new chopsticks.

It's that simple.

I mean, anybody could play it.

Whereas a musician, who was a trained musician, would have

skipped over that because that's too simple.

I get so excited about

the Halloween score because, I think, it's 5/4, technically.

But it's written in 5.

And so that is, you know, like--

And so it's, like, you count five.

But the beauty about when you write in 5 so well

is, nobody realizes it.

It's just that it just gives you this feeling of tension,

that it leaves you unsettled.

Boogie man.

He uses the main theme a lot.

And every time it kicks in--

You're, like, back in it.

Part of what makes a movie so enjoyable

is when a director knows when to kick in that theme.

What's the emotional moment where the audience is just

going to melt because they hear that

and then they're just in it again?

The thing I like about Halloween

and any Carpenter score is he's making

the music function in such a way that it best supports the film.

I think that the most important part of scoring a film

is understanding the intentions of the filmmakers.

And so, since he's one and the same,

he has that very clear understanding of how

the music should function.

Synthesizer music was considered low-budget.

You could get a couple synthesizers

cranking out a score.

But for Carpenter, this is the sound he wanted.

The idea of making this score with these, I'll say,

original textures, not a violin but a synthesizer--

it's kind of like a string--

and a sort of a brass and making these other things

put us in a different place.

It wasn't a familiar place.

It was a new place to go.

And therefore, taking those instruments and those sounds

and marrying to these, in this case, horror movie images,

became married.

It was made for those movies that way.

He's taking the most direct route from A

to B with these kind of minimalist electronic scores.

And from what I can hear, there's no kind

of compositional ego there.

There's no fad.

He just gets right to it.

And as a result, it's super effective

and it's really catchy and instantly recognizable.

We're doing this stuff, and it's so simple.

It's like, as a musician, you tend to get,

oh, this is going to be really cool--

G9, 7 over 5, and Jazzy, and all this other stuff.

And we'd sit there, and he'd hold a low C

for, like, a minute and a half.

The very most basic definition of music at the simplest form

is the alternation of sound and silence.

So there's also the space in between when there's nothing.

That's very important.

So, as a composer, you want to keep changing the textures.

You want to take a pause and give

a minute for things to breathe.

If you just keep that quietly going in the background

and the silence of the scene, everybody

knows something is not right.

And as a composer, the next thing you do

is just before the bad stuff happens,

you give them a stinger.

And you get really loud.

The score for The Shining

is interesting because it's more of a soundtrack than a score.

It's pieced together from Bartók, Penderecki.

And then the composers of record are Carlos and Elkind.

I think that there's more pre-existing pieces of music

that are repurposed for The Shining

than there is original composition.

The Shining was kind of scored by Gordon Stainforth,

the assistant editor, who was given a couple of weeks

just before the dub to lay in some music

because the Wendy Carlos music wasn't really working

out for him, although he does use

a couple of cues in the film.

That opening title sequence with Carlos playing

synth and then Elkind singing through effects is super spare--

and super effective.

It kind of feels like the motor of the car

that you see as you're tracking above it, and it also, to me,

feels like, you know, sonic neurosis taking root.

The music alone signifies that they're driving towards doom--

and there's nothing they can do about it.

That is their fate.

They were always meant to go there.

It's a terrifying film,

and the score is equally terrifying.

Whatever the explanation is--

I think we have to get Danny out of here.

Especially in the quieter bits,

the bits of dialogue where Jack is talking to his wife,

and just this creepy Bartok's sinewy kind of violins come in

and you know something is just not right.

And the music is really doing a lot of the heavy lifting

in those scenes.

Seeing how Kubrick pairs his music with the images

of the film is just like-- that's part

of what makes The Shining so haunting, so lasting.

Just a collective nightmare that we all have.

In the way that Jack Torrance has always

been at the Overlook Hotel, it feels like The Shining

has always existed.

We really can't talk about soundtracks and horror films

without talking about the sound design

because it's so intermingled.

And I'm just going to use Nightmare

on Elm Street as an example, because I

think they do such a great job with mixing the soundtrack.

One, two

Freddy's coming for you

The main theme is

ery nursery rhyming, with One, Two Freddy's Coming For You.

And that kind of theme plays throughout.

But when you see almost every set piece that Wes Craven does,

the sound design, like, when you're in the basement,

you know, you have the music playing,

but you have the dripping water.

You have the blades going across metal.

Tina goes out into the alleyway.

That metal lid comes out and spins.

Every nightmare scene, there's layers

of sound design behind it.

When Nancy goes to the jail cell,

she can hear whispers of her name coming from Tina.

Nancy.

One of my favorite scenes is when she goes down

into the basement of her house, which

turns into the boiler room.

She hears Tina whispering, Johnny Depp calling for his mom.

The overlapping of sound design and mixing it in with the score

adds 10 times the level of intensity to a film.

I was invited to join the sound team

for the Dracula film.

It was myself and another fellow up

in San Francisco that were creating sound effects

and then put it in the movie.

I didn't hear you come in.

So I was then to make all the Dracula stuff.

So what does Dracula floating sound like?

Welcome to my home.

Or what's the ambience of the castle?

I don't want to scare you, but I want us to haunt you.

This is a little different.

This is ghostly versus killers.

I made the sound of his breathing using a 5-gallon

Sparkletts bottle, but breathing across

the thing like a big thing.

We're in the movie.

The blue flames that come up at the entry--

that's actually made with a hot water heater.

It was really a challenge because everything

had to be subtle.

You couldn't hit him in the face with it.

Listen to them.

They had to lay into the layers and mix it in.

But I enjoyed the challenge.

Do it now!

I think there's a tendency to rely too much

on score in a horror movie.

When, in reality, the sound effects, or even the lack

thereof, can actually do most of the work.

I've seen a lot of horror movies recently

where you wish you were on the mixing stage,

because you just want to whisper in the director's ear like, kill

the music, you know, and then bring

the sound effects down by 50%.

Because just hearing some wind and a creaking floorboard

is all you need.

The biggest influence on film music

probably in the last 30 years has been since on electronics.

I mean, it's undoubtable.

I just rewatched Under the Skin the other week.

I mean, the score to that is such a crucial part.

It's a character, right?

I mean, it's a character in that movie.

I had the good fortune of being asked

to play with Mica Levi for a live interpretation of her score

for Under the Skin.

And I was playing electronic percussion.

And when we were rehearsing for it,

she sent me some of the samples that she

used for the percussive elements in the score.

And what I really liked about those sounds

is that they are unnatural.

They didn't necessarily sound like they

were created by organic drums or organic percussion instruments.

She played most of it herself in the studio

and did a lot of overdubs and kind of approached

it almost like making a record.

What I love about it is that it's relatively

minimal and extremely lyrical.

There's a lot of space.

And I think that all that negative space

creates a really wonderful tension that

works well with the picture.

The score for Under the Skin is both primal and minimalistic

in a way that a lot of film scores are now,

but it also taps into this itchiness

that we all have in our minds.

There's this desire beneath that score that

doesn't lead to anything good.

When we have unchecked desire and we follow it

without thinking about it, we're going

to turn into black, molten goo.

If you have a subtle drama or a light comedy

and the acting is not doing it, chances are the music

is not going to do it either.

There's something about horror films

that if a character is looking scared

but you put extremely scary music on it,

it's going to be way more powerful.

Good morning.

My elementary school music teacher, Ms. Hayden,

who was consoling me when I was a very little boy,

she said, David, the next time a scary movie comes on

and you feel like you're getting too scared, cover your ears.

It is the music that is making you scared, I promise you.

Cover your ears.

To this day, if I start to get really, really

scared in a scary movie, I'll still cover my ears.

And I'll tell my kids the same bit of wisdom.

It's all for you.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

Man: As I gaze into the stars at night,

I often ask myself, what are the must-see space horror films?

Woman: Space just makes it so obvious

that we are so insignificant.

Visually, it represents a kind of death, a kind of nothingness.

Space is horror.

Space is the worst.

What sweet music they make.

Music?