More Dread, Less Jump Scare
The easiest way to signal “horror” is with a loud, sudden musical sting, the audio equivalent of a tap on the shoulder in a dark room. But modern audiences are wise to the jump scare. Instead, today’s composers are masters of building dread. They focus
on creating an unshakable feeling of unease rather than a series of startling shocks. For the score of Netflix's “The Haunting of Hill House,” composers The Newton Brothers (Andy Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart) made a deliberate choice to prioritize emotion and sentiment over cheap scares. Their work underscores the family's trauma and the house's oppressive sadness, weaving a tapestry of sound that is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. This approach makes the horror psychological. It relies on low-frequency drones, unsettling ambient textures, and sounds that blur the line between music and sound design to create an atmosphere that feels inherently wrong.
The Power of Musical Silence
Sometimes the most terrifying sound is no sound at all. Veteran horror director Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” Contemporary composers have taken this philosophy to heart, weaponizing silence to create excruciating tension. By pulling music away at a critical moment, a composer forces the viewer to lean in, their ears straining for any clue. This quiet lets the ambient sounds of the scene—a creaking floorboard, distant wind, a character's nervous breathing—become the score itself. The Newton Brothers, in discussing their process, noted that in early versions of their “Hill House” score, they had more music, but director Mike Flanagan encouraged them to simplify and pare back. This allowed the story to breathe and made the moments when the score did swell more impactful, proving that strategic pauses can be more effective than a wall-to-wall musical assault.
Unconventional Sounds from Familiar Places
The classic horror palette—screeching strings from “Psycho,” the simple piano motif from “Halloween”—is so iconic it borders on parody. To avoid this, composers are now creating unique sonic identities by using unconventional instruments or playing traditional ones in bizarre ways. This might involve sampling and manipulating the sound of a 25-foot-tall wind harp, a waterphone, or even production noise from the set itself. For the score of “Stranger Things,” composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the band Survive drew inspiration from 80s synth pioneers like John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream. However, they consciously avoided making a direct copy. Instead, they blended vintage synthesizers with modern production techniques to create a sound that felt like a “distillation of a memory” of the 80s, rather than a direct imitation. This approach creates sounds that are organic yet alien, keeping the audience off-balance because the tones are difficult to immediately identify.
Melody as a Lingering Ghost
While a big, bold theme can be iconic, modern horror often opts for something more subtle: fragmented, ghost-like melodies that appear and disappear. Instead of a memorable tune you can hum, composers create small melodic cells or motifs that evolve throughout the story. These musical ideas often employ dissonant intervals—notes that clash and create a sense of unease, like the tritone (once known as “the devil in music”) or the minor second. These unsettling melodic fragments can attach themselves to a character or a location, functioning as an internal monologue or a premonition of doom. The score for “The Haunting of Hill House” features several of these thematic ideas that represent not individual characters, but the collective trauma of the family. This technique is less about announcing a threat and more about planting a seed of musical dread that blossoms into full-blown terror when the story demands it.
