Words by Sean Wilson

Few sub-genres of horror invite more fevered analysis or introspection than the slasher movie.

This controversial strand of horror cinema has been frequently derided for its repetitive qualities and its often facile equation between sexual promiscuity and violent death. But look closer and genuine artistry can be found, not least in the ground-breaking soundtracks that accompany these movies.

The origins of the slasher movie, and indeed the slasher movie score, are up for debate. Consensus has it that Alfred Hitchcock’s shattering chiller Psycho, released in 1960, gave birth to what we now perceive as the standard slasher set-up. (Credit can also be given to Michael Powell’s initially maligned but now celebrated Peeping Tom, released in the same year.)

Adapted from Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name, Psycho was nothing less than an epochal moment in cinema history, awakening the industry to the blockbuster potential of the horror film. The shocking murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in the Bates Motel shower cemented several slasher conventions from the unseen killer to the visceral, quick-cut editing that imitates the feel of every knife slash, not to mention the level of on-screen violence, which was truly audacious and shocking for its day.

Hitchcock devised the movie as a low-budget, experimental alternative to his more grandiose spy caper North by Northwest. These budgetary, experimental principles extended directly to Psycho’s score, composed by Hitchcock’s regular collaborator Bernard Herrmann. A famously mercurial and unpredictable artist, Herrmann proposed a “black and white” score to align with the director's literal black and white aesthetic. The composer utilised a string-only orchestra, harnessing the lack of budget to his advantage to create a jabbing, keening, relentless soundscape that was as sharply honed as Mrs. Bates’ knife. This was far removed from the symphonic horror conventions of the time such as James Bernard’s lushly baroque and grandiose orchestral works for Hammer Horror movies like Dracula (1958).

Fascinatingly, Hitchcock had initially devised the film’s most notorious scene, the Marion Crane murder, without any music at all. He specifically instructed Herrmann to stay far away from it. Herrmann then composed an arrangement of music in secret whilst Hitchcock took some time away from the production. On his return, and discovering Herrmann’s music in line with the murder sequence, high-register, shrieking violin lines, the director lauded the composer’s work for how it transfigured the visual imagery. When Herrmann reminded Hitchcock of his initial instructions to leave the scene unscored, the wry director replied: “Improper suggestion, dear boy.”

The Psycho score elevated horror film music beyond the realms of mere background expressionism, establishing a mimetic, assaultive approach that actively worked on the viewer’s emotions to enhance the level of immersion and terror. It is widely considered to be the first-ever slasher horror score. The cue that became known as ‘The Murder’ is perhaps the most famous and imitated passage in the history of film music, a shorthand for the queasy and frightening dividing line between life and death.

Pastiches of Herrmann’s work can be heard in everything from Harry Manfredini’s Friday the 13th (1980) to Alan Silvestri’s What Lies Beneath (2000). Both soundtracks utilise tumultuous orchestral set-ups with plenty of string glissando and dissonant textures to suggest impending terror. However, the concept of the slasher score isn’t necessarily duty-bound to Herrmann’s approach. Just as Herrmann made a virtue of Psycho’s non-existent budget, in 1978, director and composer John Carpenter reinvented the low-budget slasher soundscape with his score for Halloween.

The movie emerged as a voyeuristic chiller that introduced the relentless masked serial killer Michael Myers, and like Psycho, it enjoyed meteoric box office success. Halloween popularised many slasher genre archetypes including the notion of the virginal ‘final girl’ (Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis), and its minimalist score is a masterstroke of careful spotting and editing. Carpenter’s insistent and memorable themes are interlaced so effectively that Myers’ presence is always suggested even when he’s not visible on the screen.

Composed and performed by Carpenter himself, the Halloween score is anchored by its immediately recognisable main theme. He moves the idiomatic nature of slasher music away from the purely orchestral realm via a moody piano and synthesiser set-up that progresses through a 5/4-time signature and judiciously placed semi-tonal intervals to always keep the viewer on edge. The piece is first heard during the creepy opening credits sequence that pushes in toward a leering pumpkin head, and it’s dotted throughout the movie along with several other running motifs.

Carpenter demonstrated the flexibility of music for slasher movies. Effectiveness is not relative to budget, nor is an organic set-up sacrosanct. What matters is the essential dramatic instinct behind the music, no matter the practical limitations. Carpenter regularly extrapolates elements of his main theme and plays them in a fragmented fashion, always anticipating and never pointing too explicitly to the spaces where Michael may be hiding. The famous ‘prowling’ motif that stalks Laurie as she walks the quiet streets of Haddonfield, Illinois is one of the earliest examples of successful electronic integration into a slasher movie landscape, its insistent repetition creating a sense of doom-laden inevitability for the community.

The Halloween score proved as influential as the movie itself and trace elements can be heard throughout the 1980s slasher movie cycle. One example is Charles Bernstein’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), another predominantly synthesised work that adopts twisted fairy tale idioms for the early electronic generation and helps introduce the monstrous dream-invading killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). The score is centrally based around the ‘One, Two, Freddy’s coming for you’ children’s nursery rhyme that effectively locates the music in the principles of childhood fears and dreams.

The Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises ran in tandem throughout the 1980s into the 1990s. Although the movies themselves offered diminishing returns, there was plenty of scope for memorably abrasive electronic experimentation in their respective scores, which was again tied into the wider technological changes underpinning film music. Increasingly sophisticated synthesiser equipment including MIDI technology, deployed by the likes of Jerry Goldsmith, informed composer Alan Howarth’s adaptation of John Carpenter’s themes in the later Halloween films.

Harry Manfredini stayed loyal to the Friday the 13th series throughout the decade, juicing his limited musical ensemble from the first movie with increased electronic experimentation throughout the sequels that put killer Jason Vorhees front and centre. The Nightmare on Elm Street scores are perhaps the most varied and interesting of the bunch, rotating between different composers and styles in line with the fickle depiction of Freddy Krueger as either a prankster or a monster. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) showcased an early effort from Christopher Young whereas A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) was informed by the pulsating electronic ambience of David Lynch’s regular collaborator, the late Angelo Badalamenti.

Young’s work on the first two Hellraiser movies, released in 1987 and 1988, perhaps represents the slasher movie score at its most elegant, sophisticated and accomplished. The first film in Clive Barker’s sadomasochistic onslaught was supposed to have been scored by industrial band Coil. When Barker later employed Young, the movie was arguably elevated to even greater heights via a lushly, ironically romantic orchestral approach that transfigured the movie’s grisly terrors, including the demonic Cenobites, into baroque works of art. Young’s work on the sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, is even more spectacular, a thunderous choral black mass that alternates with brassy Morse Code pulses for the word ‘God’. Director Tony Randall said he intended the score to be a celebration of horror and it succeeds.

Come the 1990s the slasher movie had largely foundered in a mire of cheap scares and redundant set-ups. Director Wes Craven, screenwriter Kevin Williamson and composer Marco Beltrami gave the ailing sub-genre a much-needed kick in the right direction with Scream (1996). The movie both embraces and deconstructs slasher conventions as the rampaging Ghostface killer targets a host of cine-literate victims who are well-versed in overused horror movie cliches. The movie is granted a licence to be bone-chillingly scary and darkly comic at the same time, boosted further by Beltrami’s inventive music.

Ironically enough, Beltrami, speaking about his break-out score, confessed to not being a horror fan. This would perhaps explain the score’s intriguing textural overtones including a haunting, empathetic choral lament for the central character of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and the slyly twanging Western overtones for bumbling Deputy Dewey (David Arquette). One senses Beltrami is playing with the parameters of the slasher in the same manner as Craven and Williamson. That said, the orchestra lets rip when it needs to, harnessing a violently propulsive sense of force for the many stalk-and-slash sequences. The mimetic qualities of the stabbing, lunging string and woodwind arrangements bring everything back to the spirit of Bernard Herrmann and Beltrami’s music which was acclaimed for being an integral part of the slasher resurgence.

In recent years, the late Shirley Walker’s brooding work on the early Final Destination movies brilliantly anticipates the spectre of death and the potential for bloody mayhem. In 2015, horror It Follows deployed a pastiche John Carpenter sound from Disasterpeace that spoke directly to genre aficionados. Although It Follows is not a slasher movie per se, its nostalgic imagery of tree-lined streets and quiet suburbia meshes well with the percolating synthesised soundscape that veers from quiet menace to the sort of violent, mimetic stingers employed by Carpenter in his own Halloween scores.

The influence of Bernard Herrmann is evident in Tyler Bates’ scores for director Ti West. In 2022’s throwback slasher X, Bates’ work is a far grungier, more industrial note in line with the movie’s knowingly lurid and sleazy storyline. Bates’ skills then very much come to the forefront in X sequel Pearl (also 2022). As a movie, Pearl deploys a pastiche Technicolor aesthetic, and this encourages Bates to reach gloriously melodramatic, Golden Age heights in the string section. When Mia Goth’s murderous titular character goes on the rampage, however, cluster chords and atonal dissonance take over to remind us that this is very much a portrayal of a deluded, dangerous character.

More straightforward slasher score homages come in Bear McCreary’s energetic work for director Christopher Landon. The blackly comic Happy Death Day films (2017 and 2019) and the amusingly gnarly body-swap slasher Freaky (2020) demonstrate McCreary’s ability to harness a piercing, propulsive string ensemble in a manner that plays on the audience’s nerves while knowingly paying wider homage to the genre. Like the greatest slasher movie villain, the principles of these scores are always ripe for resurrection in a brand-new era, as seen in the John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies-scored Halloween reboots.

This is the great appeal of the slasher movie: by trading in archetypes and universal, relatable themes of survival, these stories never go out of fashion. The principles are destined to remain the same from movie to movie, inviting shiversome thrills as the viewing audience walks the line between life and death, safe in the knowledge they’ll emerge at the end of the film safe and sound. However, the outer appearance and aesthetics are prone to dynamic change, including the presentation of the music, which is pivotal to our emotional response. 

Slasher scores can accentuate minute-to-minute terror but can also play on a wider sense of empathy, in the process transforming a potentially throwaway serial killer movie into something much deeper.