Research : The Importance of Sound in Horror Films

This video allows us to see the similarity between what people think the top ten horror film theme songs are, for example a lot of them use instruments that produce sharp sound - e.g. violin, piano - or they use drums almost as a heart rate monitor to keep the pace and speed up when they want your heart rate to speed up, building up tension, there is also a lot of uses of children's voices as you get lower down on the scale and with this they use the music to give you the idea of a child's music box or lullaby. The use of a repeated motif is also used quite a lot, for example Exorcist's 'Tubular Bells', Halloween's theme and also Saw's theme used these a lot.

The effect of a lullaby or a nursery rhyme, shows the innocence of the victim or the killer. Lullabies and nursery rhymes also have quite a dark history and a lot of them are quite morbid, these are a few examples: 

- Mary, Mary, quite contrary
  How does your garden grow?
  With silver bells and cackle shells
  And pretty maids all in a row

 Which is a nursery rhyme about Bloody Mary and her bad habit of killing young girls and bathing in their blood.

- Ring a ring o’roses

  A pocketful of posies
  Ah-tishoo, ah-tishoo
  We all fall down.

This is a song about the bubonic plague, the 'ring o'roses' was one of the symptoms of Black Death - a red/rosie rash, they also used the posies were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease and death, the 'Ah-tishoo' part is the catching of the plague - the final fatal symptom and the 'we all fall down' was exactly what they did, dead.

Also the use of the music box music in Suspiria is quite foreshadowing since it's a Horror film about ballet dancers and the most common music box always has a little spinning ballerina spinning around in the middle of the box.


Also this article suggests that maybe the reason we're so effected by the sounds in horror films is because they resemble the screams of frightened animals through the use of discordant and unexpected sounds. So the use of ‘non-linear sounds’ ‘enhances the emotional impact of scenes'. So they use our sub-consciences to manipulate our feelings with the use of sound, so that we immediately become scared through what the noises represent and symbolise to our brains, usually danger.


So the piano, strings and other instruments can just be used in a way that scares us through the use of minor chords, harsh notes that clash and don't fit together and sharp tones breaking away from the norm of harmony and thing fitting together, going against what we expect. This scares us due to the fact that it is unknown and unusual and as humans we fear the unknown, no-one knows the secrets held by all things unknown and people most probably won't try find out either. 


The majority of the sound for the film is produced after the film has been finished so that it can fit with what's happening within the film - e.g. so it fits with the opening and the film itself, for example Suspiria, the music at the start of this film sets the tone for the rest of the film, as sub-consciously you recognise the music box sound and you, link it to the little ballet dancer that always spun it the middle of it.