Music and Horror

Without a doubt, no film is mentioned more frequently in writing about film music than Psycho (1960) and its infamous shower scene. As writers from Brown (1994) to Donnelly (2014) note, the way that the aggressively ‘stabbing’ musical gestures of Bernard Herrmann’s music left reviewers with the false memory of having seen the knife stabbing into Marion’s body makes this a profound moment in the history of both horror and horror scoring. The extent to which horror music is arguably over-represented in the screen music literature, certainly in comparison to genres such as romance, drama or comedy, may well be due to its role in making horror that much more horrible. Where all film music usually seeks to make us empathize, to ‘bathe the listener in affect’ (Gorbman 1987, 5), horror music is the only genre to fill the bath with acid, as it were, rather than the more soothing fantasy that Gorbman’s description suggests. Building on some of the important work in this field, notably by Hutchings (2009), Tompkins (2014) and Link (2016), I explore here how horror uses music as part of its system of signs and signals in relation to ideas of the uncanny and the abject. In doing this, I examine in particular how—and, indeed, why—the music of twentieth-century modernism has been appropriated and reimagined in horror films in ways modernist composers may not have expected.