The 13 scariest horror film soundtracks ever written

30 October 2024, 12:29 | Updated: 31 October 2024, 17:07

From ‘Psycho’ to ‘The Shining’: the most terrifying music ever written for the movies. Picture: Warner / Universal / YouTube

By Rosie Pentreath

From ‘Psycho’ to ‘The Shining’, here’s THE definitive list of the most terrifying music ever written for the movies.

The shiver and flick of high glissando strings? Check. Long, low-frequency rumbling? Check. Sudden stab notes to double the effect of an on-screen jump? Check.

The following film scores have all the devices worthy of any good horror movie.

So with Halloween just around the corner, we thought we’d dust them off so you can plan your watching, and let the music determine just how rattled you’re willing to make yourself this All Hallows’ Eve…

Psycho: Bernard Herrmann

Even the thought of those iconic violin stabs is enough to strike fear into the heart of the most hardened horror fan.
Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s tense 1960 horror film Psycho arguably set the tone for all horror scoring more than any other. It’s because of Herrmann that high string stabs became synonymous with on-screen scares.
What’s most terrifying, is that Hermann’s carefully matched his music with the stabbing action on screen to make it feel all the more real. Ouch.

Psycho • Main Theme • Bernard Herrmann
Jaws: John Williams

Similar to Psycho, the suspense and terror of the man-eating shark story, Jaws, is reinforced simply-yet-effectively by just a couple of well-chosen notes.
Film composer extraordinaire John Williams opts for alternating notes just a semitone apart, played by the tuba.
Williams himself summed it up well when he described the music as “grinding away at you, just as a shark would do. Instinctual, relentless, unstoppable…”

John Williams: Theme from Jaws (Boston Pops)
The Thing: Ennio Morricone

Fellow horror film composer, John Carpenter (see below), described the late Ennio Morricone’s score for The Thing as “fabulous”, in recent reminiscences about their collaboration on the film.
“He added something to it, that I didn’t realise, didn’t ask for. He brought it: this deep, tragic sense that this is the end of things, of everything. Oh my god, it really worked. I was delighted with it.”
Think rattling low pizzicato (plucked strings) and percussion, tense, tingling strings and organ, and sounds on a frequency low enough to send a shudder down the hardiest of spines.

The Thing (Complete Score) - Ennio Morricone
Rosemary’s Baby: Krzysztof Komeda

The score for 1968 horror classic Rosemary’s Baby makes use of high piano tingles, followed by the “la la la…” of wistful, whispery vocals for the ultimate creep-factor in the film’s intro and recurring theme.
As with the film’s little baby protagonist, the motto here seems to be: the nicer something seems, the scarier it will turn out to be…

Rosemary's Baby Main Theme Vocal
The Shining: Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind

Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind collaborated on Stanley Kubrick’s only and endlessly iconic horror movie after their work with the director on A Clockwork Orange.
Like most of Kubrick’s films, the soundtrack leans on pre-existing music – hello György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki, your atonal music truly was made for horror flicks.
But Carlos and Elkind’s cues can be heard in the film’s bone-melting organ and synths theme music, and bringing the rocky mountains to life with nauseating slices and swoops of electronic sound.

The Shining • first scene 1080p
Ghost: Maurice Jarre

Maurice Jarre’s music for iconic love story slash horror film Ghost is more about being spooky and supernatural than outright scary.
But the score sets up an intensity and uncertainness that makes the action on the screen all the more powerful and heart breaking.
And so much so when set against THAT beloved ‘Unchained Melody’ clay throwing scene…

Maurice Jarre scores "Ghost"
The Exorcist: Mike Oldfield

On the surface or in standalone listening, Mike Oldfield’s 1973 Tubular Bells is light and carefree really – cheerful even.
But matched with the sinister story of a 12-year-old girl overtaken and inhabited by The Devil Himself – with incredibly bad language and snarls aplenty to match – the music takes on a much more foreboding and weighty mood.
Yep, let’s face it: The Exorcist made that previously pretty unassuming piano motif creepy as anything.

Tubular Bells (Pt. I)
Beetlejuice: Danny Elfman

Elfman’s Beetlejuice theme is underpinned by his favourite clever syncopation (off-beats) and string whirls, and features a tight brass melody that, well, just makes us nervous.
The driving rhythm seems to both drag you along and leave you behind, utterly defenceless in the face of all the scary things that are going on.

Beetlejuice - Main title
Under the Skin: Mica Levi

Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin is Xenakis-esque – lots of creepy sliding and glissando stuff, with a sprinkling of futuristic shine in its instrumentation for harmonic strings and extended techniques.
“Some parts are intended to be quite difficult,” Levi herself wrote about the score in The Guardian. “If your lifeforce is being distilled by an alien, it’s not necessarily going to sound very nice. It’s supposed to be physical, alarming, hot.”

Mica Levi - Love (Under the Skin Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The Omen: Jerry Goldsmith

As 1970s horror fests go, The Omen is right up there for chill factor.
For the music, Goldsmith calls on uneasy, suspended choral chants underpinned by low, thudding winds, piercing strings, tubular bell glimmers and timpani rattles.
Yep, a dark soundtrack worthy of the actual Antichrist.

Jerry Goldsmith - Ave Satani. (The Omen)
Suspiria: Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke-of-Radiohead-fame’s soundtrack for the 2018 remake of witchy gorefest, Suspiria, is as beautiful as it is unnerving.
And that’s a terrifying combination. Listen to the glassy harshness of ‘The Storm That Took Everything’ and try not to shiver; the creaks and cracks in the piano-led cue ‘The Hooks’; the positively heart-ripping atmosphere of the soundtrack’s vocal-led climax, ‘Suspirium’.
Ooh. *Shivers*

Thom Yorke - Suspirium
Halloween: John Carpenter

Halloween isn’t complete without… well, Halloween.
It’s real cushion-over-the-face stuff, this horror franchise. And it’s got a score worthy of all that scared-y stuff, provided by legend of horror scoring, John Carpenter.
The piano suspends itself on one repetitive motif – reminiscent of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (see above) come to think of it – while throbbing low brass, winds and percussion swell underneath to underpin the whole gruesome thing nice and scarily.
Carpenter also wrote the music for horror classic The Fog, and directed The Thing, for which he enlisted Ennio Morricone’s film scoring talents (see above).

John Carpenter - Halloween 1978 (main Theme)
Saw: Charlie Clouser

The most memorable thing about Saw, let’s face it, is the saw.
And the gore. But give ‘Saw soundtrack’ a Google, and the evocative strings rocked by crunching (eww) percussion and rattling drum beat will take you right back into the nightmarish torture cells we see countless people subjected to in their droves throughout the franchise’s nine-film history.
Gross.

Saw Theme Song- Hello Zepp