A horror film score is music used and often especially written for films in the horror genre. Music is an Art form in which the medium is Sound organized in Time. Horror films are Movies that strive to elicit Fear, Horror and terror responses from viewers A genre (ˈʒɑːnrə also /ˈdʒɑːnrə/ from French "kind" or "sort" from Latin: genus (stem gener-) is a loose set
Contents |
Beginning of the Sound Era
1930s and '40s
While the breakthrough Universal horror films of 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein used little or no music apart from for title sequences, Franz Waxman's score for The Bride of Frankenstein is often cited as one of the first modern film scores. Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary Antagonist the vampire Count Dracula. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, generally known as Frankenstein, is a Novel written by the British author Mary Shelley Bride of Frankenstein (advertised as The Bride of Frankenstein) is a science fiction / Horror film. In particular, the long and elaborate piece that accompanies the Bride's creation is a triumph of orchestral film scoring, enhancing greatly the excitement, eeriness and wit of the film.
The late 1930s and 1940s saw unknown and often uncredited composers such as Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner setting the tone for later horror music. Hans J Salter ( January 14, 1896 – July 23, 1994) was an American film composer. Frank Skinner (b Meredosia IL 31 Dec 1897 d Beverly Hills CA 9 Oct 1968 Often the music was darkly and lushly romantic, but heavily influenced by impressionism, atonality and serialism. The impressionist movement in music was a movement in European Classical music, mainly in France that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle Atonality in its broadest sense describes Music that lacks a tonal center, or key. In Music, serialism is a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those A chief example is The Wolf Man (1940), to which Salter and Skinner both contributed.
Hammer Horror (1950s-'70s)
The British Hammer horrors of the 1950s, '60s and '70s owed their musical feel to composer James Bernard, whose pacey, often frenetic, jarring scores to films such as Dracula (1958), The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968) are among his best-known. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located Hammer Film Productions is a film production company based in the United Kingdom. James Bernard ( 20 September 1925 - 12 July 2001) was a British Film composer. Dracula is a 1958 British Horror film, and the first of a series of Hammer Horror films inspired by the Bram Stoker novel The Plague of the Zombies is a 1966 Hammer Horror film directed by John Gilling. Bernard was fond of using the score to play along with the title of the film -- his three-note signature for Dracula can be sung, and by prefiguring it with another four notes, Bernard could underscore the main title of Taste the Blood of Dracula.
In fact, Hammer employed a number of other composers, including Franz Reizenstein (The Mummy, 1959), Malcolm Williamson (The Brides of Dracula, 1960) and Tristram Cary (Quatermass and the Pit, 1967, and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, 1971). Franz Reizenstein ( June 7, 1911 - October 15, 1968) was a German-born British Composer and concert- pianist The Mummy is a 1959 British Hammer Horror film starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Malcolm Benjamin Graham Christopher Williamson AO (honorary CBE (21 November 1931 – 2 March 2003 was an Australian Composer and Master of the Tristram Ogilvie Cary OAM (14 May 1925 &ndash 24 April 2008 was a pioneering British Composer. Quatermass and the Pit is a 1967 British science-fiction / Horror film, produced by Hammer Film Productions and based on the Despite the obvious atonal influence on the earlier Universal film scores, Benjamin Frankel's 1960 score for The Curse of the Werewolf (1960) is widely believed to contain the first film theme to be based entirely on Arnold Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone scale. Benjamin Frankel ( January 31 1906 &ndash February 12 1973) was a British composer Arnold Schoenberg ( pronounced ˈʃøːnbɛrk (13 September 1874 &ndash 13 July 1951 was an Austrian and later American Composer, associated with In Music, serialism is a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those
1960s onwards
On the other side of the Atlantic, it was perhaps Bernard Herrmann's string score for Hitchcock's Psycho that changed the sound of horror music. Bernard Herrmann ( June 29, 1911 &ndash December 24, 1975) was an American composer noted for his work in Motion pictures. Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 Psycho is a suspense / Horror film directed by auteur Alfred Hitchcock, from the Screenplay by Joseph The stabbing rhythms of the famous shower scene have been imitated many times since.
The 1970s saw a new wave of slasher films, which tended to have more contemporary-sounding scores, often using electronic instruments. The slasher film (sometimes referred to as bodycount films and dead teenager movies) is a Sub-genre Horror director John Carpenter was well-known for scoring his own films, such as Halloween (1978). John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American Film director, Screenwriter, producer, film score Halloween is a 1978 American independent Horror film set in the fictional midwestern town of Haddonfield, For The Exorcist, William Friedkin rejected a score by Lalo Schiffrin and used the temp track featuring assorted pieces of music including part of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. This article is about the novel published in 1971 For information about the 1973 film please see The Exorcist (film. William Friedkin (born August 29 1935 in Chicago, Illinois) is an Academy Award-winning American movie and television director Lalo Schifrin (born June 21, 1932) is an Argentine pianist and Composer. A temp track is an existing piece of Music which is used during in Film production during the Editing phase Michael Gordon Oldfield (born 15 May 1953 in Reading, Berkshire) is an English Multi-instrumentalist Musician Tubular Bells is a record album, written and mostly performed by Mike Oldfield, released in 1973.