[Nick Zwar]

I like many “horror” scores, just as I like many “western” scores, or “science fiction” scores… but what is a “horror” score?
Leaving aside all the “science fiction” movies with horror elements (like ALIEN or THE THING), and just taking a look at what Lexica of “horror” movies tend to include, there are still many fine scores out there. Of course, I love THE OMEN scores (all of them, but my favorite may be DAMIEN – OMEN II), and classics such as Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. I could name lots… including such obvious classics as JAWS (which is often listed in horror encyclopedias), but to limit myself, here are five I chose to highlight today:

PSYCHO by Bernard Herrmann
Just strings for a black & white movie, PSYCHO is still THE classic, perhaps the first truly “modern” horror movie (just thinking about how often I saw on many old VHS covers that sold the latest cheapo-slasher stuff like: “It started with PSYCHO, then came HALLOWEEN, and now it’s BLABLABLA”).
It’s also a tremendously modern score, fully concentrated on mood. Never tire of listening to it.

POLTERGEIST by Jerry Goldsmith
This was my very first purchased Jerry Goldsmith score, and wow, what a first… THE OMEN was the Oscar-winning score for Goldsmith, but I find POLTERGEIST even more interesting. One of his most exciting scores. It’s at times ethereally beautiful as well as darkly menacing. “NIGHT OF THE BEAST” is one of my favorite cues ever… I really played that a lot as a teenager, wondering how so much fury could be jam-packed into just a couple of minutes.

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA by Wojciech Kilar
There have been many Dracula scores, such as those by Philip Glass, James Bernard, John Williams, to name just a few, but if I had to pick one, it would be this one. This sounds like music where the notes are hewn into stone—archaic, ancient, mysterious. I remember when I noticed Kilar’s name on the posters for the upcoming Dracula movie. I had one album of his at the time, the wonderful Le Roi et l’Oiseau. That was the only score of his that I knew, though I had read about some of his concert works (but not listened to them). Still, I was very much looking forward to this score, and it was everything I had hoped it would be.

CAT PEOPLE by Roy Webb
Was this perhaps the first score for a horror movie that took a child’s lullaby as its core theme? Not sure, but the music is sublime. Roy Webb was really one of the unsung masters of the Golden Age film scores. This is a horror film score that plays, apart from the movie, as music that is both unsettling and soothing at the same time.

SCARECROWS by Terry Plumeri
Now here’s a gem hardly anyone knows about. I sure didn’t know about it before Intrada released the score in 2009. I had no idea about the movie, nor did I know the composer, but I liked the cover, which is why I ordered the score. And it’s very good, very dense. I’ve seen the movie since—it came out in 1988, released in the days of endless Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween sequels—and there are quite a few things I liked about it:
First, it showed what you could do with a really low budget if you know how to use it. Then the movie eschews the clichés of the genre at the time and made something totally different: instead of beautiful teens that get stalked by invincible maniac killers, SCARECROWS pits a bunch of renegade mercenaries, who are on the run with two hostages after a successful robbery, against ominous killer scarecrows who lurk in cornfields. Far out and wonderfully creepy (when I saw the movie, I was actually overnight quite alone in a house far away from neighbors… so that certainly added to the movie’s effectiveness. 😀 ). And against a lot of 80s low-budget horror conventions, Terry Plumeri’s music is purely orchestral and relies on atmosphere and mood rather than stingers and dissonance. It’s creepy, eerie and spooky, and conjures up images of vast, deserted cornfields protected by menacing scarecrows.