The Ten Best Horror Scores

A horror film can survive a cheap monster, a wooden lead, a plot that leaks air. It rarely survives a bad score, because in horror the music reaches the part of you that reason cannot argue with — the animal listening for the wrong sound in the dark. These ten scores do the actual work of frightening you, sometimes with a full orchestra, sometimes with a synthesiser bought on a shoestring, once with almost nothing at all. For the mechanics of why they land, see how a horror score rewires the audience; what follows is the listening list, arranged so you can hear the genre teaching itself across sixty years.

The orchestra learns to scream

Psycho (1960) — Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann scored Hitchcock’s film for strings alone, a deliberate monochrome to match the black-and-white photography, and then wrote the most famous forty seconds in film music — the shrieking, stabbing violins for the shower that Hitchcock had originally planned to leave in silence until Herrmann quietly overruled him. Every screech-of-strings sting in the six decades since is a footnote to it. The genius is restraint elsewhere: the rest of the score is nervy and cool, so the eruption lands like a nerve cut. On any decent release of the film.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) — Krzysztof Komeda. The Polish jazz composer gave Polanski’s satanic-pregnancy film its most insidious weapon: a wordless lullaby, hummed by Mia Farrow over the opening credits, sweetness slowly curdled into threat. It works because a cradle song is the last place a listener braces for dread, and Komeda plays that betrayal with terrible patience. Komeda died only months after the film’s release, which has lent the melody an extra, unintended chill ever since.

The Exorcist (1973) — assembled score. William Friedkin famously threw out Lalo Schifrin’s commissioned music and built the soundtrack instead from existing modern-classical pieces — Penderecki, George Crumb, Hans Werner Henze — anchored by the cool, circling piano of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The result is a soundscape of unease rather than melody, refusing the audience any theme to hold onto. I explore how it serves the whole film in The Exorcist: Friedkin’s faith and filth machine. The film’s own audio is the only place to hear it assembled as intended.

The synthesiser era

Suspiria (1977) — Goblin. The Italian prog band composed their score alongside Dario Argento’s shoot and played it on set at punishing volume, and the result is a wall of chanting, tuned percussion, bells and hissed voices that turns a fairy-tale murder film into a sustained fever. It is arguably the loudest score on this list in every sense, and it refuses to sit politely under the images. I make the combined visual-and-aural case in Suspiria (1977): Argento’s colour as a weapon.

Halloween (1978) — John Carpenter. Carpenter wrote and performed his own score in a matter of days on a tiny budget, and its main theme — a spare piano figure in an unsettling 5/4 metre — did as much as anything on screen to make a cheap slasher genuinely terrifying. He has said an early cut played flat to a test audience until the music went on, which is the whole argument for this list in a sentence. It became the blueprint for the entire synth-horror revival that arrived decades later. See Halloween (1978): the slasher blueprint drawn in shadow.

The Shining (1980) — Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind and found music. Carlos and Elkind delivered eerie electronic realisations of the Dies Irae plainchant, though Kubrick, in his way, cut much of their work and reached instead for the modernist terror of Ligeti, Penderecki and Bartók. The dissonant strings that stalk the Overlook’s corridors are what most viewers carry home, and they make a kind of academic argument about the impossibility of the hotel itself. The way the music seems to warp the geometry of the building is the score’s real trick. On the film’s home releases.

The pulse and the pity

The Thing (1982) — Ennio Morricone. Carpenter hired the maestro and then, by most accounts, guided him toward something spare and synth-heavy — a slow heartbeat throb that mirrors the film’s central paranoia of not knowing who around the table is still human. It is unlike almost anything else in Morricone’s vast catalogue, which is why it fascinates. It earns its place beside my piece on The Thing (1982): Carpenter’s paranoia machine. The soundtrack album is easy to find and rewards a dark room.

Prince of Darkness (1987) — John Carpenter and Alan Howarth. Carpenter’s second entry here is his most oppressive: a droning, low, near-liturgical wash of synths that never once lets the tension breathe, perfectly matched to a film about liquid evil pooling in a church basement. Where the Halloween theme jabs, this one smothers. I argue for the whole underrated film in Prince of Darkness: Carpenter’s quantum apocalypse. The reissued soundtrack is worth owning on its own terms.

Hellraiser (1987) — Christopher Young. Clive Barker had wanted the industrial group Coil, and their rejected demos are the stuff of collector legend, yet Young’s lush, mournful orchestral score gave the film something rarer — grandeur, a sense of forbidden beauty behind the cruelty. It makes the Cenobites feel operatic and sorrowful rather than merely nasty, which is why the film outlasted its imitators. The soundtrack has been reissued handsomely more than once.

Under the Skin (2013) — Mica Levi. The most recent score here is also the strangest: Levi’s debut film work, built around detuned violas that slide and warp like something inhuman trying, and failing, to approximate a human sound. It matches Jonathan Glazer’s alien-predator film so completely that the two feel welded together, and it announced a major new film composer in a single stroke. The music makes the ordinary world look wrong before anything happens in it. On streaming and a fine vinyl pressing.

How to listen

Play these in one sitting and you can hear the genre thinking out loud about fear across half a century — Herrmann’s strings hardening into Goblin’s noise, Carpenter’s cheap synth opening a door that Mica Levi eventually walks through. The best of them share one trick: they refuse to tell you how to feel and instead make you feel it directly, in the body, often before the image has even resolved on screen. Begin with Halloween for the purest demonstration of how little it takes, then Under the Skin to hear how far the idea can still be pushed. Between those two poles sits everything horror has learned about the sound of dread.

A note on hearing them properly

One caution before you dive in: these scores were mixed for a dark room and a good speaker, and most of them collapse into background wash on a laptop. Herrmann’s strings need the top end to bite, Goblin needs volume to become oppressive, and Mica Levi’s violas only turn your stomach when the low frequencies actually reach you. Half the reason horror music gets dismissed as cheap or camp is that people meet it through tinny built-in speakers with the lights on. Give these ten the conditions they were built for, and you will understand why the genre has always known that the ear is the easiest way in.

The ones that nearly made it

Any list of ten is an act of cruelty, and the cuts here hurt. Jerry Goldsmith won his only Oscar for The Omen (1976), whose Latin choral chant Ave Satani is as recognisable as anything above and arguably belongs on the list on grounds of sheer craft. Fabio Frizzi’s woozy, elegiac work for Lucio Fulci — The Beyond especially — carries those gore films to a strange lyricism they have no right to. John Williams reduced a whole summer to two alternating notes in Jaws (1975), a masterclass in how little a horror motif needs to become inescapable. More recently, Disasterpeace’s synth score for It Follows (2014) and Colin Stetson’s saxophone-driven nightmare for Hereditary (2018) proved the tradition is alive and still capable of genuine invention. Any of them could displace a title above on a different afternoon, which is the whole pleasure of a canon: it is an argument you are meant to continue on your own.

If there is a single lesson threaded through all of it, from Herrmann’s violins to Stetson’s overblown reeds, it is that horror composers work by withholding. They give you less than you expect, later than you want it, in a register your body reads as threat before your mind has caught up. That restraint is the craft. Everything else is decoration.