- Varèse Sarabande
John Carpenter, the Renaissance man of horror, didn’t just help pioneer the slasher film genre with Halloween, he also created one of its most iconic scores. Bernard Herrmann’s climactic, stabbing strings for Psycho may have set the tone for scary film composition, but Carpenter’s music chases the listener with the sense of a never-ending nightmare—fitting for its seemingly invincible, purely evil villain, Michael Myers, who’s still stalking and murdering today. It’s the kind of score that confirms that you’re not just being paranoid—there really is someone lurking behind you in the shadows. This creeping dread can be found throughout the film, but it’s in the frequently-sampled main theme that fear is most potent, and then it’s multiplied as the sparse melody becomes layered with more piercing synths. Grab a kitchen knife and run. –Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Few films are as inextricably linked to their music as Gordon Parks’ Shaft is to Isaac Hayes’ compositions. “Theme From Shaft” is so woven into the fabric of pop culture that it might invite more parody than reverence now, but nearly 50 years ago, it revolutionized how music could be used in film. Before Shaft, soundtracks were collections of popular songs, while scores were designed to accompany action and dial up drama. Hayes’ take on Shaft blended the two approaches, creating an experience that worked in theaters and also on radio and record players—and in the process, topped the charts.
Though Shaft was Hayes’ first film score, he was uniquely equipped for the task. A multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, vocalist, and songwriter, he was one of the architects of the funk and R&B sound of Stax Records, and knew how to create something massive from the ground up. When tasked with dramatizing Shaft’s scenes, he enlisted his home team—the Bar-Kays, the Isaac Hayes Movement, and the Memphis Strings & Horns—and drew from a palette of styles that told the story of where black music was and where it was going. Jazz, R&B, rock, blues, funk, and nascent disco are all present and vital. The album would cement Hayes as a star and earn him an Oscar for Best Original Song—the first for an African-American composer. The greatest testament to its impact remains the theme, still purring in our heads today. –Timmhotep Aku
“He only finishes a picture 60 percent,” Bernard Herrmann said of Alfred Hitchcock. “I have to finish it for him.” The composer worked with Hitchcock on a number of films, and though he may have written a richer score in Vertigo, nothing else remains as iconic as Psycho. You could argue that Herrmann didn’t “finish” Psycho; he made it. Hitchcock must have thought so, too, because he doubled Herrmann’s fee.
Accordingly, people say that Psycho invented slasher movies, but really Herrmann did, and he did it with a single string cue. Nothing in the famous shower scene—not the pulling back of the curtain, not the shot of the killer’s knife poised high, and not Janet Leigh’s scream as the knife digs repeatedly into her flesh—cuts as deep as those violin shrieks. Slasher movies, and the gruesome way they play on your nerves, gushed forth from this inciting wound; think of the string screeches as Jason emerging from Camp Crystal Lake at the end of Friday the 13th, or the stabbing lurches of the Jaws theme. They are little pieces of the DNA left in Psycho’s blood trail. –Jayson Greene
- Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
Miles Davis recorded the score to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released as Elevator to the Gallows in the U.S.) in 1957. Its open-ended modalities point forward to the jazz giant’s groundbreaking 1959 LP Kind of Blue, and even to the ghostly proto-ambient atmospherics of In a Silent Way, released just over a decade later. Malle’s film is a noir thriller, with pitch-black subject matter—adultery, murder, claustrophobia. The bleak, lonely sound of Davis’ muted trumpet matches the stark black-and-white imagery perfectly, and the short, near-fragmentary nature of the compositions allow Davis to break out of the hard bop confines of the 1950s. Taped with a pickup band of Parisian jazzers and the ace drummer Kenny Clarke, Miles’ mostly improvised score provides a sense of almost unbearable tension, whether the musicians are lingering on a doomy, morphine-drip bassline or racing along to the skitter of Clarke’s deft high-hat work. Adding music to film brought out some of Davis’ most inspired and adventurous playing. –Tyler Wilcox
Wendy Carlos’ score for A Clockwork Orange was designed to disorient. Stanley Kubrick’s film takes place in a dystopian future, and its main character, the sociopathic youth Alex, is obsessed with the music of Beethoven—the sound of the distant past. Carlos was the perfect composer to articulate this temporal instability; in her massively popular and groundbreaking 1968 album Switched-On Bach, she showed how ancient music could be updated with forward-looking electronics. Armed with a battery of synths and the assistance of her regular producer and collaborator Rachel Elkind, Carlos crafted a dense and tonally slippery world that reinforced the essential horror of the film, sometimes by offering creepily cheerful counterpoint. Great art, the film suggests, is just as easily embraced by monsters, and this uneasy irony comes through in both Carlos’ electronic re-imagining of classical themes (“The William Tell Overture,” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9) and in original compositions, like the slowly unfolding and brilliant opener “Timesteps.” Hearing it now, almost 50 years after its release, amplifies the record’s confusion in the best possible way. It remains an inscrutable and rewarding puzzle. –Mark Richardson
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The flickering two-note coyote bay. The vaulting trumpet fanfare. The click-clack rhythm of horses, wagon wheels, and, later, gargantuan steam engines: Ennio Morricone’s theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a musical metonym for the American West, a cultural artifact as tied to that mythology as the Red Rocks of Sedona and John Wayne. In fact, half a century later, it’s difficult to imagine high noon without Morricone’s signature melody.
Sergio Leone intended his film to be a studied yet hyperbolic send-up of western films, in which a triangle of outlaws outrunning the Civil War (as heard in the immortal lament “The Story of a Soldier”) search for treasure, culminating in a wonderfully absurd graveyard confrontation. Morricone responded by synthesizing the genre’s storytelling tropes—insistent motion, arid twang, outsiders’ impressions of Native American music—into dense sonic pieces that pull at tension until it snaps and amplify drama until it overflows. They’ve never been outdrawn. –Grayson Haver Currin
- The Virgin Suicides
In her filmmaking breakthrough, Sofia Coppola turned Jeffrey Eugenides’ dark, dirty novel The Virgin Suicides into a love story of sorts—between teenagers Lux (Kirsten Dunst) and Tripp (Josh Hartnett), and also between five beautiful, doomed sisters and their haunted admirers. Coppola met her tonal match in the French electropop duo Air, who agreed to write a score as long as they could approach it like an album. The result proved just as bold and cosmic as Air’s classic debut, 1998’s Moon Safari, but with a stronger air of mystery, vis-à-vis ’70s prog influences, insistent synths, and cryptic lines of film dialogue. The Lisbon girls are like a surreal daydream when set to “Playground Love,” featuring an intoxicating sax solo and a drowsy, sexy performance by Phoenix’s Thomas Mars. When that same melody recurs by piano on “Highschool Lover,” its coolness has turned wistful and heavy, consumed by lingering questions the boys are afraid to ask. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Air, “Cemetery Party”
- There Will Be Blood
Starting with a title that promises violence as directly and ominously as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—another cinematic nightmare about unsustainable consumption in the American West—writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson treats his adaptation of muckraker Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! as a tale of demonic possession. The demon in question, though, happens to be money. So if Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s original music for There Will Be Blood sounds like the score for a horror movie, that’s because it is.
Leadoff track “Open Spaces” is the tell here. Despite long string phrases that evoke the wide landscapes crossed by the misanthropic oil magnate Daniel Plainview, the mood is not openness but dread. “Future Markets” and “Proven Lands” clatter and pulse with infernal-engine energy. “Henry Plainview” hums like flies on a pig’s head. Strongest of all, the title track is a two-minute masterpiece of jump scares and screeching cacophony in the lineage of Psycho and The Shining. Greenwood creates a soundtrack for a haunted hotel where the elevator doors gush crude, and the killer’s ax is embedded in the earth itself. –Sean T. Collins
- Under the Skin
Though Mica Levi cites her childhood love of Disney films as an inspiration for her first film score, Under the Skin contains nothing approaching conventional songcraft or leading cues, dwelling instead in unsettling shards of gray. She has also likened the effect of her incessant, microtonal viola-playing to a beehive—though it is more malevolent than that, evoking the way Japanese honeybees swarm around an intruding giant hornet and cook it to death.
From this menacing shudder emerges leering shrillness and disembowelling slurps, flooding sensations that simulate organs swelling with blood. That sense of simulation is key: Director Jonathan Glazer’s extraterrestrial protagonist is disguised as a human woman unsettled by their emotions, a confusion Levi captures by making her sexiness uncanny. (Fitting, also, that the score was partially inspired by strip club music.) Jonny Greenwood’s work for There Will Be Blood inspired a run of dissonant scores: Under the Skin represents its apex. –Laura Snapes
It’s shocking to consider that Blade Runner did not get nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, or any other major Oscars. Equally bewildering is the fact that Vangelis won Best Original Score for 1981’s conventionally pretty Chariots of Fire, but wasn’t even honorably mentioned for his far richer contributions to Blade Runner. Vangelis composed the score live, improvising as scenes from the film unfurled onscreen in his London recording studio. “Everything was composed with the images,” he said in 2007, adding that “the reason I wrote the score is that I was very impressed with this film.” There is a palpable sense of awe trembling through his every keystroke, as well as a subliminal sense of competition—a drive to not only match the majesty before his eyes, but maybe even surpass it.
Before Blade Runner, electronic soundtracks for science fiction movies painted the future as cold, sterile, emotionless, as hostile to humanity as Saturn’s liquid hydrogen surface and diamond rainstorms. Vangelis broke with these accumulated clichés, draping Blade Runner’s scenery with droopy pitch-bent synth tones of unexpected warmth and wetness. From the colossal, thudding pillars of percussion that open the film, through the mystic yearn of “Rachel’s Song” to the climactic twinkles of “Tears in Rain,” everything is drenched in reverb—an effect as atmospheric and seductive as director Ridley Scott’s over-reliance on shadow and drizzle.
It’s impossible to imagine this film without its music, so intertwined are the sounds and the visuals. Although the movie takes place in a 21st-century Los Angeles teeming with flying cars and huge, animated billboards advertising a fresh start in the off-world colonies, the music is steeped in aching nostalgia as much as disorienting futurity. And that’s just right for a film that, for all its stunning special effects and storyline about androids gone AWOL, is rooted in the archetypes of 1940s film noir and hardboiled detective fiction: Deckard as the cop with the tough exterior and the big soft spot, Rachel equal parts vamp and broken-winged angel. Ghosts of older styles haunt the edges of the score, from jazz and blues to the crooned 1920s pastiche of “One More Kiss, Dear.”
There are also pungent aromas of ersatz exoticism, like the keening quasi-Arabic wails in “Tales of the Future” and the vaguely Eastern cavalcade rhythm of “Animoid Row.” We don’t know quite where or when we are with Vangelis’ score, which mingles ancient and modern, East and West—perfectly matching this futuristic West Coast that resembles a Pacific Rim hybrid of Shanghai and Santiago. It’s a tomorrow’s world more vividly imagined than filmgoers had ever before encountered, and Vangelis filled every corner of this space with life as strange and lonely as our own. –Simon Reynolds