From Psycho to Suspiria: The Music Industry's Favourite Horror Movie Scores
It’s spooky season and nothing gives us the goosebumps quite like a macabre musical score.
Warren Bray – music supervisor, Grayson Music Group
John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror film 'The Thing' is widely regarded as a masterpiece of the genre. One crucial aspect of the film’s success is the score by legendary composer Ennio Morricone. Carpenter usually scores the music for his own films, but he felt 'The Thing' needed Morricone's unique and experimental approach that could delve deeper into the film's themes of dread, isolation and paranoia than he could himself. The iconic main theme makes use of a heartbeat motif played on a bass synth. It's a simple one bar ostinato consisting of two statements of a low F, one at the start of the bar and one at the end.
This heartbeat rhythm serves as an unsettling anchor as the characters lose their ability to trust one another, while the repetitive pattern almost represents The Thing itself; an antagonistic threat ever-present throughout the film. The cold and bleak sounds of the orchestra and synthesizer also perfectly reflect the film’s Antarctic setting, as well as the crew’s mounting paranoia and distrust throughout the film. Overall, the score uses simplicity over bombast to amplify the film's horror of the unknown, which makes the music from 'The Thing' a definitive sci-fi horror soundtrack.
Freddie Woolley – transfer engineer, Jungle Studios
Mica Levi’s score for 'Under the Skin' is brilliant. They really master sonic unease and, in my opinion, redefined what a horror soundtrack can be.
Instead of relying on traditional orchestral techniques or jump-scares, they made an alien sound world using distorted strings, warped rhythms, and dissonant tonalities that perfectly mirror the film’s cold tone. The music feels both human and inhuman - much like Scarlett Johansson’s otherworldly protagonist.
Tracks like 'Love' and 'Death' use repetitive, sliding string motifs that create a hypnotic, almost nauseating effect, pulling the listener into the film’s unsettling psychological space. Levi’s minimalist approach leaves room for silence, making every sound within the score and within the scene cut through.
The score evokes fear not through volume or speed, but through texture and alienation. It also lingers long after the film ends, a haunting reminder of how sound can make the familiar feel terrifyingly foreign as it follows you out of the theatre. Truly spooky!
Joey Reyes – executive producer, MAS - Music and Strategy
My favorite horror film score of all time is 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (the original from 1974) by Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell. It’s not your typical film score that relies on traditional orchestral elements and melodies. It’s treated more like experimental sound design that uses found objects to create harsh noises like metal screeching, percussive banging, and eerie distorted drones (and let’s not forget the infamous “flashbulb” sound that was created by rubbing a tuning fork against a piano string… CREEPY!)
These sounds blend so well with the film’s sound effects that it’s often hard to tell the difference between the score and the sound design. The raw chaos of the film score works hand in hand with the film’s gritty documentary-style visuals. Together, it creates an atmosphere of dread that pulls you in and makes you feel like you’re stuck in the same world as the characters instead of just watching a movie.
Doug Redfern – senior creative, Jung von Matt London
As a bit of a Young Fathers fanboy, I was so excited when I heard Danny Boyle had chosen the group to score '28 Years Later'. The storyline has a perfect blend of hope and horror, something that seems to suit the contrasting elements you often find in Young Fathers’ music.
The tracks 'Promised Land' and 'Lowly' lure you into thinking - Hmmmmm, maybe after 28 years, the zombies are chill?
'Abide', uses the tried and tested approach of giving you the shivers with eerie singing children - Please, zombies… not the children.
Then 'Sheku' and 'Alpha' smack you in the face with a sound that’s distinctively Young Fathers - Okay, these zombies definitely aren’t chill.
But the cherry on the giant, (sometimes naked) zombie-infested cake is the use of Rudyard Kipling’s 'Boots' on the track by the same name. Taking a poem about a genuinely traumatic period in human history is harrowing. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t find a distorted VO from a century ago a little creepy anyway. I wish it wasn’t on the trailer though, for the surprise factor. But, when a track is that good, who can blame them.
Like other amazing musicians turned composers, (Jonny Greenwood, I’m looking at you) hopefully, this is the first of many for Young Fathers.
Tanya Mills – junior producer, Wonder
The scene in 'Insidious' where the little ghost boy darts through the house to ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ still gives me chills to this day. The song isn’t scary on its own – it’s light, cheery and almost silly, which is exactly why it works. The juxtaposition between the sound and scene is what makes your stomach twist, making something that should feel safe suddenly feel eerily wrong.
The sound design is what really drives the storytelling here. The scratchy, high-pitched vintage quality gives the song a false sense of innocence – something nostalgic that suddenly feels unsafe. The steady tempo against growing visual tension creates emotional dissonance, making your brain feel off-balance. You’re stuck between comfort and fear, and that tension keeps you locked in the moment. It’s a brilliant example of how sound can completely reshape how we experience a scene.
Sound builds emotional context - it tells people how to feel. The right score can calm a room, heighten anticipation, or make an audience feel connected without a single visual cue. When used intentionally, it doesn’t just support a story - it creates an experience.
Beau Manning – sound designer and mixing engineer, Barking Owl
One of my favorite scores from a horror film is Pino Donaggio’s composition for Brian De Palma’s 1980 film 'Dressed to Kill'. Without the visuals, you might hear Donaggio’s music and think to yourself, “This isn’t a horror score...,” and that’s exactly what I love about it.
The main theme features sweeping strings, piano, harp, and even some almost choral-style vocals. The music is actually quite beautiful, but once De Palma begins to ratchet up the tension, Donaggio’s score follows suit. The elevator scene is a great example: the music starts light and tender all the way up until the moment of the reveal, when Donaggio cuts in with cold, piercing staccato strings. This score does an excellent job weaving together multiple moods. It’s not necessarily an in-your-face horror score, but that’s what I love about it; it bends the rules of what a traditional horror movie score can be.
Andi Lewis – senior producer, Machine
The main theme of 'House' (1977), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi with music by Asei Kobayashi and the band Godiego, has been lodged in my head since I first heard it. The film is wonderfully bizarre and yet the plot is classic horror. A group of teen girls travel to a remote house and find that the property and its inhabitants don’t have their best interests at heart. The theme is an earworm that sounds both nostalgic and vaguely unsettling. It first appears as if coming from a musicbox, saccharine, innocent. As the girls are drawn to the house, the theme travels with them into a far more strange territory. The motif repeats, mutates, and blends with kitschy psychedelia, bursts of rock, pop, and jazz-fusion.
As the matriarch of the household gleefully enacts her sinister plot, a montage plays in time with the theme, complete with a chattering skeleton and a cat meowing melodically along. One of the girls, Melody, lulls herself, her companions, and the audience into a false sense of security by repeatedly playing the theme on a particularly hungry piano. As the theme carries us through and the story unfolds it becomes all too clear that Obayashi and Kobayashi had a great time bringing this twisted fever dream to life.
Keith Ohman – sound director and engineer, Pirate Sound
The reason Jerry Goldsmith’s score for 'The Omen' is so downright terrifying is because it takes the idea of sacred, religious music and twists it into something dark and menacing. Instead of just going for the usual screechy strings or sudden stabs, he makes the music feel like an unstoppable force creeping in from another world. The chanting and the orchestral blasts give it this eerie, almost holy vibe that makes you feel like the evil in the movie is much bigger than the characters themselves.
It’s not just spooky background noise, it feels like the music is actively working against you, like it knows something terrible is about to happen. It also started a whole trend of using choirs in horror scores, because once people heard how unsettling it could be, everyone copied it. Goldsmith’s score doesn’t just underline the horror, it actually is the horror. No wonder it won him an Oscar. It’s the kind of soundtrack that keeps echoing in your head long after the movie ends and still keeps me up at night.
Keith Bayley – senior producer and composer, The Futz Butler
Let’s start by offering my credentials for writing about horror soundtracks: a few years back I was searching for guitar sounds for a composer mate’s occult movie score (for a famous Hollywood director). An impatient and brutal scrape of a cheap classical guitar’s strings through a series of fuzz pedals instantly became the sound of the lead demon: dark, violent, human but inhuman, a scream in the dark.
2024’s 'Longlegs' has impeccable scare credentials; director Osgood Perkins is the son of Anthony – Norman Bates in 'Psycho' – and his brother Elvis Perkins created the soundtrack under the pseudonym Zilgi. Two elements jump out of the 'Longlegs' sound world: Zilgi’s use of dark fuzz guitar, which is rooted into the backstory of the titular character. 'I’ll Be Your Behemoth' uses jagged chords reminiscent of a glam rock hit heard in a fevered nightmare.
Secondly, the integration of Zilgi’s score and the remarkable sound design by Eugenio Battaglia creates a palette of subliminal messages, whispers, reversed voices, and warped everyday sounds (too-loud door slams, footsteps, unsettling diegetic music) leaving the audience in a state of constant unease.The deformed glam rock aesthetic peaks as Longlegs drives away from a hardware store and screams in the car: his last word morphs into a distorted guitar solo, suggesting a disembodied higher – or lower? – form of power driving his actions.
RG Lacandola – lead content capture creative, EP+Co
What really sticks with me from horror movies isn’t always the full score or theme but it’s the distinct, haunting sounds that stay lodged in your brain long after the credits roll. The shrieking violins from 'Psycho', for instance, feel less like music and more like a direct hit to the nervous system. A pure panic in sound form. Then there’s that sharp, metallic camera shutter in 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', which somehow feels more violent and disorienting than any scream. Or the eerie static and muffled hum in 'The Ring', which manages to make even silence feel threatening.
These sounds aren’t just part of the background; they become characters themselves, setting off an instinctive kind of fear that visuals alone can’t create. They crawl into your subconscious and stay there, resurfacing at random moments when everything is quiet. That’s the power of a great horror sound. It doesn’t just scare you while you’re watching, it stays with you and follows you home.
Kelly Oostman – sound designer and mixer, Sonic Union
As a sound designer and horror enthusiast, I’ve always been fascinated by how a film's score builds anticipation alongside sound design to make you feel something before you even see it.
When talking about scores for horror films, I feel it’s only fair to start with 'Psycho'. We all know the scene I’m referring to, right? The quintessential stabbing strings waltz around and repeatedly shriek with dissonant notes. Using repetitive rhythmic motifs, Bernard Herrmann’s score creates an anxiety-inducing sonic landscape that communicates Bates’ aggression and instills the audience with dread and fear.
'Halloween' is another beautiful example of infusing score with anxiety and instability by using rhythm, repetition, and refusal to resolve. In the main theme of the score, John Carpenter uses syncopated notes in a 5/4 time signature. And just when you think you’ve figured out the structure of the melody, it changes; projecting an uneasiness onto the audience as the unrelenting pace of the music drags them in closer.
Finally, 'Jaws'. Perhaps one of the most recognizable character themes in film history, John Williams uses two notes, directly referencing Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 'From the New World' to create tension and suspense under the approach of an unseen villain. 'Like Halloween', this rhythmic theme repeats throughout the movie to build fear in the audience of what’s to come.
Bob Schachner – sound designer, Alkemy X
I have to admit I’m not a fan of horror movies. I once spent hours designing the sound of eyes slowly being squished and it was not a pleasant experience. That being said, I do have a favorite score for a horror movie.
The movie is 'The Lazarus Effect' and cut 16 - 'The Cortical Substance' - is a perfect final theme. Emotional and threatening all at once. The composer is Sarah Schachner. Yes, we are related, and yes, I mixed the score.
Jen Moss – music supervisor, SIREN
As SIREN’s resident horror nerd, this was a bit of a Sophie’s choice picking just one horror score but in the end I have decided to go with Italian prog rockers Goblin’s seminal score for 'Suspiria'. The film, a gory and nightmarishly surreal story of a dance school hiding a witchy secret. The legend goes that king of the giallos (Italian slasher movies), Dario Argento read the band the script and gave them three months to write a soundtrack that could be played during the shoot to set the film’s tone.
They experimented with adding atypical instruments such as the bouzouki, mandolin, and tabla drums to their usual set up creating a woozy yet tense exercise in dread, dissonance, and bizarrely funky prog to freak audiences out. My favourite cue is the main theme which has a creepy music box feel to it and an utterly bone chilling, barely audible whisper. A disembodied and strangely seductive voice luring audiences into the darkness.
Joe Philips – creative director of sonic branding and composer, Another Country Detroit
I confess: I haven’t seen many modern horror movies. Yet, during childhood, I tuned in weekly to TV20 Detroit’s Thriller Double Feature on Saturdays and spent late-night sleepovers watching the classics on VHS and cable.
Thinking back, I recall liking Gil Mellé’s score for 1977’s 'The Sentinel', which I re-listened to this week, and let me tell you, it’s a treat.
While not thematically or melodically “quotable,” the listening experience is quite fantastic. Mellé tastefully bridges traditional, orchestral composition and experimental, electronic synthesis (all with a little Rhodes sprinkled in) – expertly weaving emotions and timbres together, to create a fluid, unsettling vibe.
Furthermore, I love the sound of this score. It’s well-recorded, sonically rich, and nostalgic. A precursor to the genre-defining synth scores of the 80s, this sounds like the studio still had some of that old money left to spend.
Cues like 'Marked Child' oscillate between sunlight and shadow. 'Nightmare' antagonizes with its simple persistence. 'Through Me, The City of Grief' unnerves when dizzying strings seamlessly intertwine with swirling synths, and 'To the Depths' and 'The Sentinel' both get big AF.
With 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, visual merits may be debatable, but the sonic experience is undeniable.
Tim Kvasnosky – sound ECD, BUTTER Music
'The Shining' is essentially a masterclass in how to unreservedly terrify an audience without resorting to cheap musical jump scares. Kubrick eschews a composer and raids the dusty avant-garde canon – Penderecki, Ligeti, Bartók – and turns their extended string techniques and snarling tonal clusters into the very grammar of fear. It’s terror with a PhD: meticulously dissonant, icily brilliant, and far too sophisticated to let you sleep afterward.
Tōru Takemitsu’s 'Kwaidan' score proves you don’t need an orchestra to scare people – just a lute, some echo, and the nerve to let negative space do the killing. It’s horror as minimalism, where silence hits harder than any jump scare and every drip of water feels like divine punishment. Takemitsu basically invented the “prestige horror” vibe before A24 figured out how to sell merch.
Can Misirlioglu – executive creative director, CYLNDR Studios
It’s one thing to make a soundtrack that scares an audience, but it’s something else entirely when it uses every tool in the box to pull us into the emotional experience of a central character. That’s why Mica Levi’s soundtrack for 'Under the Skin' still haunts me.
There’s an emotional maximalism beneath the seemingly minimal compositions which are a seamless blend of music and sound design. The result is a mind-bending effect that leaves the audience emotionally disoriented. Melancholy, anxiety, sadness, longing, hope, despair, intimacy, alienation – they all intertwine throughout the film, echoing Scarlett Johansson’s character’s emotional confusion as she tries to integrate into human norms.
This idea of layering and bending multiple emotions into a single piece of sound alone gives me goosebumps. At times subtle but always relentless, Levi’s score is a physiological experience as much as an audible one, and stands out as an experience of its own. (Try listening to the OST by itself—eeeekkkk!).
Oscar Kugblenu – audio post production manager, 19 Sound
Without any hesitation, it’s Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 cinematic masterpiece, 'Psycho'. One of the most tense, dramatic, terrifying scores ever composed!
In the main theme Hermann expertly uses leitmotifs that take you on a sonic journey of what you’ll experience watching the film. It cleverly manipulates your emotions at every level, adding tension, drama, suspense and terror.
The genius of Hermann’s score is that is that it’s an integral part of the of the film, identifiable, in it’s own right as if it’s its own character. This approach would influence generations of composers and film makers to come, especially in the Horror genre.
We all know “the shower scene” listen to the way he uses the”screeching” of the strings, making them more and more intense with each stabbing motion. It heightens the fear and terror, not just of the characters in the film, but the watching audience as well.
A scene that is over in a matter of seconds, feels like it lasts for minutes due to the power of the score.
Bernard’s score manipulates you and your emotions as much audibly, as Hitchcock does visually. It’s a perfect match!
