Horror film music grew from a silent-era pianist’s cue sheet into some of cinema’s most copied sounds. Bernard Herrmann’s string stabs in Psycho, John Carpenter’s piano figure in Halloween, and Goblin’s prog-rock witchcraft in Suspiria still turn up on critics’ lists. Their makers ranged from a radio dramatist to a director who could barely play.
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This guide follows the sound from the first quiet monster films to the current horror boom, and ends with a starter guide of scores to hear first.
Where the scary sound began
The horror genre is more than a century old, with early silents such as Le Manoir du diable in 1896 and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1920. Silent films relied on live accompaniment, and the Library of Congress still keeps the cue sheets and stock music written for it. Its Music Division holds scores for tens of thousands of films, going back to the medium’s first years.
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The machinery to fix music to a film arrived late in the silent era. Warner Bros used its Vitaphone system, a sound recording on disc played in step with the picture, for Don Juan in 1926. The same system carried The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first film with voices synchronised as well. Discs drifted out of step, so the industry soon moved to printing the sound straight on to the celluloid.
A monster with no music
An early sound horror film was strikingly quiet. Universal’s Frankenstein of 1931 had dialogue but no continuous music, which means the famous cry of “It’s alive!” lands against a thunderclap rather than an orchestra. It followed Tod Browning’s Dracula in Universal’s run of monster pictures, and the author Christopher Frayling links that cycle to the anxieties of the 1930s depression. He traces the earlier German expressionist wave, Caligari and Nosferatu among it, to the turmoil that followed the first world war.
Boris Karloff, born William Henry Pratt in Dulwich in 1887, finally became a star with Frankenstein at the age of 44. His daughter Sara recalls him calling it his 81st film, and saying hardly anyone had seen the first 80. He did not think of it as a horror film at all. In her account, he preferred the word terror, for films that leave the viewer’s imagination to finish the scene.
That idea of the unseen, finished in the viewer’s head, is the job music would take on. It took Hollywood a few years to work out how.
Building the orchestra of fear
The Guardian’s history of film soundtracks credits Max Steiner, an Austrian-born composer, with refining how a score could work in King Kong for RKO. Steiner used the orchestra to carry the story, set each scene, and shade emotion. Symphonic Hollywood film music built on that framework for decades, and in some ways still does.
Bernard Herrmann came at it from a different angle. He had worked in radio drama in New York alongside Orson Welles, and Citizen Kane was his first film score. Surrounded by European composers, he avoided the lush studio sound and wrote a palette tailored to mood and atmosphere.
Strange new instruments
Hollywood soon began flirting with electronic sound. The theremin, a wavering instrument played without touch, appears in Dimitri Tiomkin’s music for The Thing from Another World and in Herrmann’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, both from 1951. Then Louis and Bebe Barron, a couple working with magnetic tape, made the first wholly electronic film score for Forbidden Planet. The Guardian notes that it blurred sound effects and music, and inspired a new generation of composers.
Those early films still pull composers back. In 2001 the American composer Michael Shapiro wrote a full-length score for the 1931 Frankenstein, and he is set to conduct it live with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Cadogan Hall in London. He says the music lets the film leap off the screen in a new way. The French composer Félicia Atkinson has gone further with Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage, reinventing its score as a 90-minute work. Her album Sans Visage, a 34-minute cut of that score, was due on June 26, 2026.
The composers who taught films to frighten
The sound of horror came from unlikely places: a radio drama studio, a synthesiser lab, an Italian rock band, and a young director scoring his own film. The same names turn up on list after list.
Bernard Herrmann and the string section
Herrmann arrived in Hollywood from New York radio with Citizen Kane, his first film score, and a taste for bespoke sound-worlds over the studio’s syrupy symphonic style. Pitchfork’s critics suggest his Psycho strings may have defined how scary films sound. Steven Severin, bassist of Siouxsie and the Banshees, picked out the choice behind them in his list for Mojo. Herrmann used only the strings of the orchestra, with no brass and no percussion. Severin called that decision a stroke of genius, and noted that the full recording finally gathers all 40 of Herrmann’s original cues.
Wendy Carlos, the synthesiser pioneer
Wendy Carlos showed how old music could take electronics in her hugely popular 1968 album Switched-On Bach. She scored Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange with her producer and collaborator Rachel Elkind. Rolling Stone reports that Elkind’s voice on the Beethoven march was reportedly the first use of the Vocoder keyboard on record.
Kubrick brought the pair back for The Shining, then discarded most of what they wrote. Only the title theme, a reworking of the Dies Irae chant, and a cue called “Rocky Mountains” survived. Pitchfork’s Grayson Haver Currin still calls their opening music the defining piece of the film. Severin gave the “lost” Shining score an honourable mention in his Mojo list.
John Carpenter, the director at the keyboard
John Carpenter was 30 when he made Halloween in 1978. He co-wrote it, directed it, and scored it himself. Rolling Stone traces the main theme’s 5/4 rhythm to the bongos his father, a music professor, taught him as a teenager. Carpenter took his cue from Goblin’s Suspiria and Herrmann’s Psycho, and he told the magazine that the Jaws theme proved two notes could hold suspense.
He was modest about it. “I have minimal chops as a musician,” he once said, and he put the theme’s unease down to his own playing. Severin called Halloween the grandaddy of modern electronic horror scores. Pitchfork called Carpenter the Renaissance man of horror.
Goblin, the rock band from Rome
The Italian prog-rock band Goblin first worked with the director Dario Argento as last-minute substitutes on Profondo Rosso in 1975. Their 1977 score for Suspiria followed, and Severin says Goblin practically invented sound design with it, mixing whispers, sighs, and celeste. Pitchfork notes that founding member Claudio Simonetti toured in 2018, performing the score live to screenings.
The avant-garde in the stalls
Horror also opened a door for concert-hall modernists. Kubrick and his music editor Gordon Stainforth filled most of The Shining with existing works by György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki. Werner Herzog turned to Florian Fricke’s band Popol Vuh for his 1979 Nosferatu remake, after they had already scored Aguirre, Wrath of God. Jerry Goldsmith, whom Severin calls an old master, won an Oscar in 1977 for The Omen.
The pioneering has not stopped. Kane Parsons was 16 when he began making short Backrooms films on YouTube, where the hum of lights and shuffled footsteps made the sound design an online phenomenon. He self-released full soundtrack albums before A24 made a feature, which he scored with the Canadian composer Edo Van Breemen.
The scores that set the rules
A handful of scores turn up again and again when critics rank horror music. Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, NME, Mojo, and the Grammy website all reach for many of the same records.
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Psycho, 1960
Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock is the fixed point. NME calls its violin stabs one of the most recognisable musical cues in cinema history. It also argues the whole string score plants hints about the plot and makes the audience afraid before anything bad happens. The Grammy website hears it as the last of a trilogy of suspense scores, after Vertigo and North by Northwest. Severin counts more than 55 cuts in the 55 seconds of the shower scene.
The Wicker Man, 1973
Robin Hardy’s film runs on folk songs. The New York musician Paul Giovanni came to its Celtic folk material as an outsider, much like the film’s Scottish police sergeant. Pitchfork’s Sean T. Collins singles out the opening adaptation of Robert Burns, the filthy drinking song “The Landlord’s Daughter”, and “Willow’s Song”, the set’s standout. Severin wondered how traditional folk songs could turn profane, humorous, and disturbing in the same film.
Jaws, 1975
Before Star Wars, John Williams built a monster out of two notes. The Grammy website describes the theme as a tuba impersonating a shark as it inches towards its prey. It also hears Debussy and Stravinsky in the wider score, and singles out the lonely harp notes that follow each attack. Carpenter cited the same two notes when he explained his own approach to Rolling Stone.
The Omen, 1976
Jerry Goldsmith took the possessed-child cycle of the late 1970s and gave it a choir. Severin singles out the bells and the “Ave Satani” chorus of the opening, but also praises the tender music for family scenes that lull the viewer between shocks. Goldsmith won the Oscar for it. The Grammy website still introduces him as the composer celebrated for The Omen.
Suspiria, 1977
Goblin’s score is, in Pitchfork’s words, exalted by horror connoisseurs and electronic producers alike. The Grammy website calls Argento’s film one of the most unsettling horror spectacles ever made. Severin thought Goblin never bettered it.
Halloween, 1978
The Grammy website notes how rare it was, then, for a director to compose his own score. It lists the parts: a sequencer, odd time signatures, and a creepy keyboard line, a sound that spawned many imitators. Carpenter calls some of its piercing keyboard stabs “cattle prods”, placed to make audiences jump. Severin credits the film with creating the slasher sub-genre.
The Shining, 1980
Here the score is mostly borrowed. Pitchfork describes how Kubrick set Ligeti’s “Lontano” and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta against moments that should feel playful or innocent, and dropped a period ballroom ballad into the haunted hotel. NME credits Kubrick and Gordon Stainforth with assembling a turbulent, queasy collage from experimental composers.
The Thing, 1982
Ennio Morricone wrote a glacial orchestral score for John Carpenter, who then added electronic tones of his own to some scenes. NME hears bass guitar standing in for a heartbeat beneath the strings and drones.
The ones that bend the rules
Some favourites sit at the edge of the genre. Pitchfork places A Clockwork Orange among the best film scores of all time, and says Carlos’s synths reinforce the film’s horror with creepily cheerful counterpoint. Rolling Stone puts the same score on its horror list. The Grammy website calls Pino Donaggio’s music for Dressed to Kill, in 1980, possibly the most perverse horror score ever written. Mojo’s Severin admits that Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells works in The Exorcist, but he would not tell anyone to buy it on its own.
How the sound left the cinema
Once the rules were set, horror music moved in two directions at once. It spread out of the cinema into pop and hip-hop, and it pulled in new instruments, from new wave synths to chiptune.
The tricks every composer learned
A BBC guide to horror scores sets out the toolkit plainly. Composers alter a note or two in a chord, so the harmony sounds wrong even to a listener with no training. They speed up notes or chord changes as a threat approaches, as in Jaws, where the shark’s theme starts slow and grows faster and louder as it closes in. They also cut the sound out entirely, because a sudden drop can grab attention harder than a loud blast. The BBC guide points to Herrmann’s shower cue in Psycho as a prime example of displaced peaks and dissonance.
Synths take over the 1980s
Jay Chattaway scored William Lustig’s Maniac in 1980 with new wave synths and droning electronic beats, giving New York’s grime a sense of dread. The German electronic band Tangerine Dream scored The Keep in 1983, and NME credits the music with smoothing over the film’s troubled production. Philip Glass scored Candyman in 1992.
The Guardian dates a parallel shift in mainstream film music to Hans Zimmer’s Crimson Tide, which fused electronics with orchestra and choir. That hybrid became, in the paper’s view, the sound of modern Hollywood.
Into the charts
Horror sounds also crossed into pop. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1984, with a synth bassline, horror-film sound effects, and a spoken passage by the horror star Vincent Price. Rod Temperton wrote the song, and John Landis directed the zombie video. Earlier, in May 1973, the Edgar Winter Group’s instrumental “Frankenstein” reached No. 1.
Carpenter’s Halloween theme went further. Rolling Stone notes that hip-hop artists including Dr. Dre and the Notorious B.I.G. adopted it. Pitchfork calls it frequently sampled.
New sounds for new fears
Later horror scores drew on whatever their composers knew best. John Murphy’s score for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002 gave the zombie film an epic scale. Mica Levi, of the indie pop band Micachu and the Shapes, scored Under the Skin in 2013 with industrial jabs and twisted soundscapes. Disasterpeace drew on a background in chiptune and video game music for It Follows in 2014.
Jordan Peele’s Us, in 2019, cut familiar horror tropes with the unexpected. Michael Abels set choral writing beside a slowed version of Luniz’s 1995 hit “I Got 5 On It”. The previous year, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke wrote his first feature score for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, before most of the film was shot.
The films themselves kept changing too. The Guardian argues that the current wave of socially minded horror began with Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2017, which opened the door for directors such as Ari Aster.
What horror sounds like now
Horror is having a boom. The Guardian reports that horror took £83,766,086 at the UK and Irish box office in 2025, a 22% rise on 2024. Charles Gant of Screen International told the paper that five horror films reached £10m that year, after none did in 2024.
The scores of a boom year
Several of those hits lean hard on their music. NME’s round-up of 2025’s best soundtracks says the blues horror Sinners peaks not with its dancing vampires but with Miles Caton’s performance of “I Lied To You”. For 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle hired the Mercury-winning Scottish band Young Fathers, and the film reuses “East Hastings” as a callback to the famous opening of the 2002 original. Zach Cregger’s Weapons, about 17 children who vanish from one class at 2.17am, carries a score he oversaw with the composers Ryan and Hays Holladay. Rolling Stone ranked both Weapons and 28 Years Later among its ten best horror films of 2025.
Old scores on new stages
Classic scores now fill concert halls. Pitchfork notes that Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti toured in 2018, playing Suspiria live under the film. NME reports that Billie Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers have both joined arena concerts of Danny Elfman’s music for The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Radio is digging into the back catalogue too. A BBC Radio 4 documentary in its Seriously series, presented by the composer and pianist Neil Brand, revisits Hammer’s scores of the late 1950s and 1960s. Hammer’s music supervisor, Philip Martell, hired young modernists such as Elisabeth Lutyens, Benjamin Frankel, Malcolm Williamson, and Richard Rodney Bennett. They scored horror to fund their concert work.
Researchers can consult the archive in the Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Reading Room. The Library holds Bernard Herrmann’s holograph manuscripts on microfilm, alongside more than 3,000 silent-film scores and arrangements from 1904 to 1927.
Horror in the charts, out of season
Spooky songs no longer wait for October. Billboard reports that “Dracula” by Tame Impala and JENNIE climbed back to No. 14 on the Hot 100 in June 2026, after peaking at No. 10. “Thriller” returned to the top 10 for a week after Halloween in 2025.
The genre’s critics see more to come. Frayling expects horror films in 2026 and 2027 to react to anxieties about AI.
Starter guide
Start with these eight scores. Two trusted publications put each one on a list of the best, the greatest, the essential, or the defining film scores.
- Psycho (Bernard Herrmann, 1960). The Guardian puts it among the 50 greatest film soundtracks, and IndieWire lists it among the best horror film scores.
- Rosemary’s Baby (Krzysztof Komeda, 1968). The Guardian puts it among the 50 greatest film soundtracks, and IndieWire lists it among the best horror film scores.
- A Clockwork Orange (Wendy Carlos, 1971). The Guardian puts it among the 50 greatest film soundtracks, and IndieWire lists it among the 25 best movie scores of the 1970s.
- The Wicker Man (Paul Giovanni, 1973). The Guardian puts it among the 50 greatest film soundtracks, and IndieWire lists it among the best horror film scores.
- Don’t Look Now (Pino Donaggio, 1973). The Guardian puts it among the 50 greatest film soundtracks, and IndieWire lists it among the 25 best movie scores of the 1970s.
- Jaws (John Williams, 1975). Empire names it among the 20 soundtracks that defined the 1970s, and IndieWire lists it among the decade’s 25 best movie scores.
- Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). IndieWire lists it among the best horror film scores, and Empire names it among the soundtracks that defined the 1970s. The BFI also counts it among Carpenter’s five essential soundtracks.
- The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980). The BFI counts it among Carpenter’s five essential soundtracks, and IndieWire lists it among the best horror film scores.
