How to Compose Horror Music

In this guest blog post, author and Senior  Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University, Dr Matt Lawson, shares his tips for effectively composing a piece of horror music.

A popular choice amongst pupils studying film music is to write music for horror film, or music that it is in some way suspenseful. This is both a blessing and a curse, as it provides the opportunity for real creativity with instrumentation, orchestration, harmony, and texture, but also runs the risk of the pupils falling back on well-worn cliches such as the stabbing string sequence in Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock; Composer: Bernard Herrmann, 1960).

Shower scene from ‘Psycho’ – (teachers please be aware that ‘Psycho’ is ‘R’ rated which translates as a ’15’ rating in the UK, and therefore may cause distress to students.  We suggest playing audio only.)

However, horror scores don’t have to fall into stereotype and cliché. There a multitude of ways in which horror can be represented musically, using the full range of instruments and textures available. 

Let’s take a fictional but familiar sequence, whereby a child is walking home alone down a suburban street, when suddenly the streetlights go out, and the child is left alone in the dark. At this point, especially if it is set in winter, you might have a close-up shot of the child breathing heavily with anxiety, with the hyper-real sound of breathing complementing the visible breath in the crisp air.

As a composer, we now ask – what mood do we want to create here? Firstly, come up with some key words. These might be ‘alone’, ‘winter’, ‘child’, ‘scared’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘emptiness’, ‘unseen threat’, ‘creepy’, or ‘danger’. Each of these words could have its own musical response. Let’s start with ‘alone’, ‘vulnerable’, and ‘emptiness’.

Each of these words suggests solitude, so my instinct here would be to write music that is sparse in texture. A well-used trope in such instances, bringing in the word ‘child’, is the use of a music box, glockenspiel, or celesta to evoke an almost mocking innocence in a scary situation. This instrument, when used solo, isn’t creepy or horrific intrinsically, but combined with the visual can become terrifying. This example, an audio track by Ryan Creep, highlights the mysterious and sinister nature of a seemingly innocent, childlike instrument: