Horror Movies

Spine-chilling music is nothing new — frankly, composers have been creeping us out for centuries, going as far back as Johann Sebastian Bach's ominous, oozing organ piece "Tocata and Fugue In D Minor, BMV 565." Still, musical spooks-induction has flourished in the age of the cinema and its bloody obsession with horror. Just try not to think of masked madmen and gleaming butcher knives as John Carpenter sends glassy synths skittering across your dark places. Meanwhile, violins swipe at the steamy shower curtain of Elmer Bernstein's "Psycho – Suite," and someone, somewhere screams through the mystifying music-box melody of Goblin's "Suspiria."

Tangerine Dream nails the electro-horror creep-out piece, in Next Steps.

Not many scores are as gloriously gothic in their widescreen rendition of creeping death as the title and theme music of Hammer Films' Dracula, brilliantly rendered here by the City of Prague Philharmonic. But that's not all on offer in celluloid's creepiest domains: Danny Elfman adds manic comedy to the main titles from Beetlejuice, and Tangerine Dream's droning, ambient techno template for "Betrayal (Sorceror Theme)" spirals through the (disturbed) mind. There's also the drunken, he-is-risen percussion of Jerry Goldsmith's "Imhotep," and a selection from the many classic movie monster performances of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

There's more from Danny Elfman, at his sinister best, in Deep Cuts.

Much like the crypts and caverns that scary movie scores conjure up out of the ether, the deeper we delve into our playlist the more frightening and revealing the spooky soundscapes become. We now know that Danny Elfman is a master of the macabre, bringing to mind headless horsemen and serial killers — for Sleepy Hollow and Red Dragon respectively — not to mention a decaying but delightful Corpse Bride. We've also confirmed that that Italian prog rockers Goblin were one of giallo maestro Dario Argento's greatest allies; and that John Carpenter's chilling synthesizer scores (with added gasoline on "Christine") are as seminal as his films.

Having a Halloween party but don't know where to begin, beyond buying the perfect costume and stocking up on "boo brew"? Nothing says "good eeeeevening" or "I want to suck your blood" quite like loudspeakers piping in hours of scary movie music, spanning the vampire-friendly chasm from Hollywood's golden age to its modern horror era, with a batch of B-movies scores and Italian giallo grooves darkening every terrifying screen second in between. Without recycling too many creepy or kooky clichés, these sounds trigger long-buried memories of meat cleavers and chainsaws, zombies and "Zombi," masks and madmen, dashes of suspense, and mounting layers of the ever-versatile, ever-unsettling synthesizer.