Horror film score
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A horror film score is music used and often especially written for films in the horror genre.
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[edit] Beginning of the Sound Era
Early horror films, like all films prior to 1927 were of course silent, but with the advent of the sound era, it became common for studios to use uncredited excerpts of atmospheric music in horror films, rarely commissioning a separate score. For example, Universal's 1931 Dracula borrowed music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which was used again by the same studio in The Mummy (1932). Horror film music at this time tended to be heard only over the opening and end titles. This changed in 1935 when Universal did the unthinkable and had a "serious" film composer (by Hollywood standards) write a full score for James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein. The music's pioneering, quirky, yet epic style more than matched the director's own offbeat vision. It was also the first score to use a Theremin, an electronic synthesizer whose distinctive sound became a familiar convention in horror film scores for the next few decades.
[edit] 1940s and '50s
The late 1930s and 1940s saw unknown and often uncredited composers such as Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner setting the tone for later horror music. Often the music was darkly and lushly romantic, but heavily influenced by impressionism, atonality and serialism. A chief example is The Wolf Man (1940), to which Salter and Skinner both contributed.
[edit] Hammer Horror (1950s-'70s)
The British Hammer horrors of the 1950s, '60s and '70s owed their musical feel to composer James Bernard, whose pacey, often frenetic, jarring scores to films such as Dracula (1958), The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968) are among his best-known. In fact, Hammer employed a number of other composers, including Franz Reizenstein (The Mummy, 1959), Malcolm Williamson (The Brides of Dracula, 1960) and Tristram Cary (Quatermass and the Pit, 1967, and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, 1971). Despite the obvious atonal influence on the earlier Universal film scores, Benjamin Frankel's 1960 score for The Curse of the Werewolf (1960) is widely believed to contain the first film theme to be based entirely on Arnold Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone scale.
[edit] 1960s onwards
On the other side of the Atlantic, it was perhaps Bernard Herrmann's string score for Hitchcock's Psycho that changed the sound of horror music. The stabbing rhythms of the famous shower scene have been imitated many times since.
The 1970s saw a new wave of slasher films, which tended to have more contemporary-sounding scores, often using electronic instruments. Horror director John Carpenter was well-known for scoring his own films, such as Halloween (1978).
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