Five terrifying film scenes that are all about the music

Bloody good: Christian Bale plays the murderous banker Patrick Bateman in American Psycho
Jochan Embley19 October 2018

Think about your favourite horror movie scenes — the ones that always lurk in the back of your mind, making you wish you could sleep with one eye open — and the chances are there's a killer soundtrack accompanying it.

So much of the genre is visual, from the gore and the grotesque villains to the ghoulish settings, but the aural aspect is crucial. It sets the mood, ramps up the tension and makes the heart beat that little bit faster.

Here, we've picked out five iconic scenes (only four from the horror genre, but all wholly unnerving) where music plays the starring role. Just don't blame us if you can't get to sleep tonight.

Psycho — Bernard Herrmann (1960)

The fact this scene can be so endlessly aped, by both the parodists and lazy composers that followed, and still retain all of that gut-twisting terror, 58 years after it first appeared on-screen, is testament to just how special it is. It’s the scene that made a generation of people ever so slightly scared to close their eyes while taking shower, but what really seeps irretrievably into the crevices of the memory are those piercing orchestral shrieks, courtesy of composer Bernard Herrmann. They cut as sharply as the knife, clawing at the silence that had previously reigned. As the blood trickles away and the hand scrapes slowly down the bathroom tiles, the full horror of what’s just happened sinks in, and Herrmann’s score swells with looming, unforgettable dread.

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Halloween — John Carpenter (1978)

In horror, the unknown is always scarier than the known. It’s about what isn’t seen or heard, rather than what is — that dark suspense is a central tenet of the genre. In the closing scene of Halloween, the score from the masterful John Carpenter explores this sparse unease to devastating effect. Those staggered pianos leave a cavernous space between them, punctuated only by a shrill staccato — and with those noises, Carpenter created a faithful sonic representation of fear itself, both the unutterable dread and the frenzied alarm. The synth that comes in on top is breathless as Michael Myers tears at those cupboard doors. As it all reaches fever pitch, with Laurie Strode’s thrust of the knife — silence. It stays that way until the arrival of the film’s unforgettable scene — seeing Myers sit up behind Strode hits like a punch to the stomach, but it’s the return of the pianos, a second later, that squeezes the last gasp of air from your neck. That’s not to even mention the music that accompanies the gloomy closing sequence. Exceptional.

Suspiria — Goblin (1977)

This scene is by no means just about the music — it is shot faultlessly by director Dario Argento, bursting with colours that are vivid to the point of nausea — but the score is utterly essential, one half of a gruesome marriage between sight and sound. Written by the Italian prog-rock band Goblin, with guidance from Argento, the score is a voyage of occult psychedelia. It matches the grotesque viscerality of the visuals — the third time we see the face pressed up against the glass, a horrific contortion of the face, it’s matched by a dark static splurge — and as the faceless killer takes hold, the percussion is a psychotic clatter. Once we we reach that blood-splattered crescendo, the music breaks into a tinnitus siren. It’s the kind of score that forbids you from breathing or blinking, such is its all-encompassing effect. Thom Yorke, who is scoring the 2018 remake, released next month, has a lot to live up to.

American Psycho — Huey Lewis and The News (2000)

“You like Huey Lewis and The News?” There’s a dark comedy that flows throughout American Pyscho and in no other scene does it land quite so stingingly as it does here. The murderous Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman is a man of contradictions and the hideous dichotomy of his character comes to the fore here. As he proceeds to hack his business-card rival Paul Allen to death, with blood-spewing force, we’re blasted with the chirpy optimism of It’s Hip to be Square. At first it may seem laughable, but once Bateman sits down and smokes his cigar with chilling nonchalance, and we’re left to ponder the body he’s just hacked to pieces, with that now-enraging song still playing, any smiles disappear.

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The Exorcist — Tubular Bells (1973)

The eerie tune that has come to define the Exorcist — and become a totemic composition in the world of horror — only actually appears in the film fleetingly, in two scenes (in fact, one of the most memorable scenes in the film, in which the possessed Regan twists her head all the way around, is completely free of music, relying solely on the haunting visuals). But it is this song, Tubular Bells, written by Mike Oldfield, that leaves a lasting impression on all who hear it. The piece is used in this scene, in which an otherwise tranquil walk home is punctuated by a sighting of two distressed vicars. It crafts a sense of disquiet that swells throughout the rest of the film — it is subtle, wholly effective and, perhaps rather mistakenly, iconic.

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