From Berlioz to Black Sabbath: how to scare yourself this Hallowe'en
Think of the great horror movies, and you’ll find it’s really the music that’s sending your pulse sky-high and making your skin crawl. The circling shark’s fins in Jaws wouldn’t be half so scary without John Williams’ two-note grunting in the tuba and double-basses. Jack Nicholson’s demented leering face in The Shining horrifies us because the glistening modernist music of Gy?rgy Ligeti has been scratching away at our nerves. Scarlett Johansson as the alien in Under the Skin might just seem like a beautiful hitch-hiker if it weren’t for Mica Levi’s score, slithering downwards like a musical Dali watch to make it clear Johansson is not what she seems.
These are recent examples of something that has a long history: stirring our sense of the uncanny and frightening through music. And when you trace that history, you find certain musical devices and “tricks of the trade” were there from the start.
Opera is where it all began, because opera has always had scenes of mystery and terror. Take the famous song of the Frost Genius in Henry Purcell’s “semi-opera” King Arthur, first seen in 1691. The Frost Genius isn’t threatening, but this gaunt, white-haired personification of Winter is certainly uncanny, and even at a distance of 332 years the music makes our skin prickle. Why? I would say there are two factors. The stringed instruments in the orchestra play on the bridge of their instruments, which makes a peculiar scratchy sound. And the harmonies have a slide-slipping ambiguous quality. We don’t quite know where we are.
So right there, at the dawn of “horror music”, we have the two basic ways in which music can be scary. One is what you could call the “cognitive” way. It works on our mind, by taking familiar “turns of phrase” and twisting them so they no longer “make sense”. The music becomes a metaphor for the way the strange happenings in the dark house or spaceship don’t “make sense”. The other way works directly on our nerves, with sounds that evoke something unpleasant. It could be a suggestion of something scratchy, or oily, or slithery, or ice-cold—or burning hot. Or it might be a sudden shock of brutal, shrieking loudness, the musical equivalent of the plunge on the Big Dipper.
Though horror and fright made their debut in music in the Baroque, and surged up here and there in the late 18th century (think of that still scary scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni where the stone statue comes to life), it was in the romantic era that they swelled to enormous proportions. The most famous example of romantic horror in the concert hall is Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which climaxes with an orgy of witches evoked by clattering violin bows and gibbering high clarinets.
In German romantic opera there was a positive tidal wave of ghouls, goblins and devils. My favourite example is the Wolf’s Glen scene in Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (“The Freeshooter”). There’s a famous scene where two hunters forge magic bullets with the aid of the devil, while an off-stage chorus of the devil’s little helpers whoop exultantly. The violins and cellist scrub away, making that scratchy sound that worked so well for Purcell. And in amongst the harmonies, again and again, you hear one particular chord that became the commonest musical symbol for scariness.
We call it the “diminished seventh” chord, and what makes it scary is that it is cognitively difficult to grasp. It’s made of up four notes, each of which is the same distance from its neighbour. That’s very unusual—most chords have notes at different distances, which gives the whole chord a rooted, stable quality and also suggests a specific key. The diminished seventh feels weirdly rootless, and can be resolved into four different keys, none of which has a special claim to be the “right” key. It dissolves our sense of stable harmonic terrain—we literally “don’t know where we are”.
This chord had an extraordinarily long career. You find it in Wagner, clothed often in a new addition to the armoury of “horror” sounds: pinched, sinister muted brass. Later the chord became the standby of silent film pianists, forced to improvise scary music to go with yet another scene where the heroine is tied to the railway tracks. Later, when the “talkies” arrived, it popped up in film scores with what some would say is monotonous regularity. It’s a reminder that scary music, like every other kind of music, developed its own set of conventional symbols. Just as swooning violins and swirling harps “mean” love, so the pinched sound of muted horns and the diminished seventh “mean” scariness.
The trouble with conventions is that eventually they wear out. As the great modernist Arnold Schoenberg put it, the diminished seventh “became banal”. And yet it only takes a small twist to bring these old devices back to life. One of the oldest, the so-called “Devil in Music” took on a new lease of life in “Gothic” 1970s rock bands like Black Sabbath. This spooky-sounding interval (which is actually contained in the diminished seventh) goes back to classical composers with a taste for the diabolical, like Franz Liszt, but when clothed in the howl of an electric guitar it takes on a whole new force.
Contemporary composers of horror film scores have discovered that they can ratchet up the “cognitive” route to horror by placing things side-by-side that don’t belong together. In the classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby the Polish composer Krzysztof Komeda achieved this by putting an innocent-sounding song together with creepy atonal string sounds. Another technique is to harp on a cramped, constricted melody to create a feeling of unavoidable fate, as Italian composer Ennio Morricone did so brilliantly in the score to John Carpenter’s The Thing.
As for the other method, of working directly on the nerves, the advent of electronics has given contemporary composers like Mica Levi a vast new armoury of creepy, slimy, ice-cold sounds. But however much the surface of horror music might change, those old conventions never entirely go away. Take that stern church chant the Dies Irae, which is all about the terror of the Last Judgement. It was a very effective symbol of horror in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Liszt’s Totentanz, and lo and behold, there it is at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Sure, it’s a knowing, tongue-in-cheek use, but it still works. And as Levi’s score to Under the Skin shows, the old techniques like “scratchy” strings are still as common as they ever were. So when you curl up for Hallowe’en with a horror movie, it’s a fair bet the music will be scaring you with tricks that stretch right back to the days of Henry Purcell.
6 Best Musical Horrors
Francis Poulenc – Organ Concerto (1938)
Alongside scratchy strings and snarling brass, the sound of an organ playing doom-laden chords fortissimo is the horror composer’s most trusty stand-by. Poor Francis Poulenc had no intention of writing a horror film score when he composed his Organ Concerto, but that’s how everyone hears it.
Bernard Herrmann – Psycho (1960)
Everyone remembers the slashing string sounds for when the murderer’s knife slashes through the shower curtain. But it’s the build-up to that moment that’s so impressive, with a meticulous use of different musical ideas to symbolize pursuit, secrecy and solitude.
Franz Waxman – The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
This score from the golden age of Hollywood film music has it all: diminished sevenths by the bucket-load, shrieking dissonances, snarling brass, cleverly offset by the occasional lyrical moment, and floating above it all the unearthly sound of a 1920s electronic instrument, the Theremin.
Berlioz – Witch’s Sabbath (1830)
The first two minutes of this portrayal of an orgy of witches is almost a demonstration of traditional horror music techniques. First the basses outline the creepiest interval in music, the “devil in music”, then we get that horror chord in high strings, which tip-toes downwards with diabolical lightness.
Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)
The video for the title track of Black Sabbath’s first album shows a huge thunderstorm over a graveyard. The “devil in music” repeated over and over in the bass guitar goes perfectly with Ozzy Osborne croaking. “Satan’s coming round bend, people are running ‘cos they’re scared.”
Jung Jae-il – Squid Game (2021)
This Korean horror series about a game that gradually kills off its participants was a hit for Netflix in 2021, and it strikes a genuinely new note in horror music. It’s that ticking, never-ending percussion, which combined with the na?ve recorder melody and marching tuba summons up a world of amoral blankness, where evil is cloaked in cheerfulness.
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