The best known horror movies aren’t’ just famous because of their storyline. Instead of the storyline, music or scores play a vital and significant role in a movie’s success. It is because soundtracks during a movie build pressure, tension, terror. And emotions on the viewers. Some horror movie soundtracks are worth listening to while wearing hands-free or headphones to experience the real terror. Some of the most remarkable horror songs are collected for you here in this post which you can play even at your Halloween party or in any other event where you want to have a terrifying theme.
1. Se7en (1995)
As this incredible psycho killer mystery arrived, it seemed like a film that didn’t follow the proven murder-movie guidelines. Appropriately, the score wasn’t quite your typical music ever. It was the perfect mash-up of models, with everything from Marvin Gaye to further Haircut 100 to Billie Holliday represented. Gravity Kills provided the only piece of rock, with their right track Guilty, from their punk soundtrack journeymen (and early Nine Inch Nails sound-alikes). To be frank, the true highlight of this album is musician Howard Shore’s suite of gloriously dark scores.
2. “Thinking of You” by A Perfect Circle
“This song seems to have a creepy mix of sounds, like heavier distorted ones, as well as more atmospheric and thrilling tones that might get you thinking the spirits are watching you. The melody at times employs an exotic-sounding level that enhances the mood — that the very first two vocal notes are from a ‘diminished 5th,’ an artistic interval that has been titled ‘Diabolus in musica,’ or ‘The Devil in music,’ owing to its dissonant quality since the 18th century.
3. The Shining (1980)
Many claim that Shining’s soundtrack is amongst the most powerful to construct a bizarre and horrendous world for the film – for a good cause. Each piece of the soundtrack is nicely positioned within the context of the film. During several film’s most suspenseful sequences, high-pitched, nearly drowning strings persist, leaving you on alert alongside the actors. The film’s quieter moments are filled with unsettling, deeper atmospheric bits.
4. “Dark Entries” by Bauhaus
The tonal consistency of the guitars, including warped riffs and scratchy guitar solos, dominates this album’s atmosphere. The chromatically falling guitar line and even the vocal, which isn’t really a harmony but a sequence of monotonic, nearly unrelated pitches that conflict with the accompaniment, have a substantial degree of dissonance. The lo-fi aesthetic and strange voice expression provide an eerie atmosphere, similar to being pursued across the woods by just a chainsaw-wielding psychopath.
5. Suspiria (1977) – Goblin
Goblin is often regarded as the godfathers behind this horror soundtrack. Working with legendary directors such as George A. Romero & Dario Argento, the Suspiria album remains their pinnacle. Back in 2013, I had the good fortune to catch Goblin during their first American tour. It was awesome to see a group of happy, aging Italian guys rocking out to songs they wrote in the 1970s but never got to perform live.
6. “Hurdy Gurdy Man” from ‘Zodiac’ (2007)
This song connects the start and the end of David Fincher’s three-hour epic about the Zodiac killer’s assaults on San Francisco as well as Valejo Valley in the 1970s. For the first time five minutes in, we hear it when the Zodiac approaches his first victims in a deserted clearing. Donovan’s soft, almost distant voice lends the scene a dream-like psychedelic ambiance. This surreal nightmare seems all too realistic.
7. Elton John: “Madman Across the Water”
Through the Water, Madman, released in 1971, is better known for offering famous Elton John/Bernie Taupin hits such as “Tiny Dancer” and “Levon.” However, the album’s title track is a dark deviation from Elton’s songs. Many people have interpreted the album as a sad political allegory; another perception is that it is a tale told from the perspective of anyone who has been institutionalized. The soundtrack nightmarish symbolism takes the audience on a dynamic ride, putting the main character standing on the shore gazing at “a boat on the reef with a broken back,” as well as standing in a high tower, going to jump out immediately, even when musing “the ground’s a long way down, but I need more.”
8. It Follows (2014)
John Carpenter openly acknowledges that he copied some of the Goblin catalog’s harmonic stylings. Today’s composers return the “favor” by drawing influence from Carpenter, whose work influenced Rich Vreeland/music Disasterpeace in David Robert Mitchell’s indie sleeper about such an unstoppable mystical force that behaves like a virus. Disasterpeace’s brooding score ideally complements the film’s chilling intervals of uneasy quiet and tumultuous suspense, using a new synthesizer process named chiptune but adding a nostalgic sound straight out of the early ’80s.