Music, Mystery and Monstrous Agency: The musical construction of the White Walkers in HBO’s Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is primarily a fantasy drama centring on numerous claimants vying for the Iron Throne. There is, however, another King with no interest in human politics: the Night King, whose army of White Walkers is moving south to threaten all of human kind. Although rarely seen in the first three seasons, the zombie-like White Walkers are introduced in the pre-title sequence of the first episode, and their music is the first we hear in the entire series.
In this paper, I examine the music used for the Walkers to trace their passage from unsettlingly mysterious to overtly monstrous. Initially, their music focuses on an ambiguous motif that combines ideas of both major and minor tonality, played on an eerily beautiful glass harmonica. At the end of season 2, when we see the true threat posed by the army of the dead, the motif transforms in a quite extraordinary way, removing all traces of eerie mystery and replacing it with a lumbering, monstrous reworking played on growling double basses and strident brass.
More than simply reorchestrating the theme, however, the composer, Ramin Djawadi, combines their motif with the series opening credits theme to create an identifiably new musical idea. The way the series theme is normally used in the score creates a strong association with ideas of agency: quite specifically, human characters whose actions are accompanied by this theme are those who, at that point, can be seen to be “winning” the game of thrones. The White Walkers appropriate this idea of agency to their own quest for world domination, the monstrous musical mashup becoming the theme of the Walker’s dark agency that remains their primary musical identifier for the rest of the series.