Beginning of the Sound Era

Early horror films, like all films prior to 1927, were of course silent, but with the advent of the sound era, it became common for studios to use uncredited excerpts of atmospheric music in horror films, rarely commissioning a separate score. For example, Universal's 1931 Dracula borrowed music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which was used again by the same studio in The Mummy (1932). Horror film music at this time tended to be heard only over the opening and end titles. This changed in 1935 when Universal did the unthinkable and had a "serious" film composer (by Hollywood standards) write a full score for James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1936). The music's pioneering, quirky, yet epic style more than matched the director's own offbeat vision. It was also the first score to use a Theremin, an electronic synthesizer whose distinctive sound became a familiar convention in horror film scores for the next few decades.
 

1940s and '50s

The late 1930s and 1940s saw unknown and often uncredited composers such as Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner setting the tone for later horror music. Often the music was darkly and lushly romantic, but heavily influenced by impressionism, atonality and serialism.


Hammer Horror (1950s-'70s)

The British Hammer horrors of the 1950s, '60s and '70s owed their musical feel to composer James Bernard, whose pacey, often frenetic, jarring scores to films such as Horror of Dracula (1958), The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968) are among his best-known. In fact, Hammer employed a number of other composers, including Franz Reizenstein (The Mummy, 1959), Malcolm Williamson (Brides of Dracula), 1960) and Tristram Cary (Quatermass and the Pit, 1967, and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, 1971). Despite the obvious atonal influence on the earlier Universal film scores, Benjamin Frankel's 1960 score for Curse of the Werewolf is widely believed to be the first film score to be based entirely on Arnold Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone scale.
 

1960s onwards

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, it was perhaps Bernard Herrmann's string score for Hitchcock's Psycho that changed the sound of horror music. The stabbing rhythms of the famous shower scene have been imitated many times since.

The 1970s saw a new wave of slasher movies, which tended to have more contemporary-sounding scores, often using electronic instruments. Horror director John Carpenter was well-known for scoring his own films, such as Halloween (film) (1978). Another great artist is Graeme Revell who used to be behind the famous post-industrial band SPK.

For those who like monstrous soundracks, the following movies are probably the best of the last decade: Judgment Night, Lost Highway, Spawn, Blade II, Queen of the Damned and Matrix

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