Crate Digging is a recurring feature that takes a deep dive into music history to turn up several albums all music fans should know. In this edition, film composer and former Nine Inch Nails band member Charlie Clouser shares his picks for the 12 best horror movie scores, just in time for Halloween.
No one knows what it takes to create a great horror movie score like a composer who’s done the job as many times as Charlie Clouser. The composer behind the Saw films’ distinctive score, though, tells Consequence that “I’m not a horror movie expert, so my knowledge of the genre and the traditions established within it is by no means comprehensive. I’m just reacting to what I think is effective music within the genre.”
This means that when we asked him to create a list of his favorite horror scores, he wasn’t afraid to go with some unconventional picks. “I realize a lot of Top 10 horror scores lists will be talking more about Friday the 13th, and movies that have a very memorable theme or a hummable singable theme,” he says. “And that’s usually not what I gravitate towards. I’m usually more interested in and impressed by when the music feels of a piece with the place and the story, whether it’s just one note being played, or an interesting sound that conjures up that feeling that I’m seeing on the screen. That’s to me as effective, maybe even more effective than a singable theme from Halloween or whatever.”
That said, Halloween director/composer John Carpenter is represented below, along with several other icons of the genre. While Clouser describes his work in the Saw universe as “maximalist,” many of his picks feature a more austere approach. “Whenever I see these well-executed minimalist scores, I always wish I had done it,” he says of his fandom for these composers.
While this list is technically unranked, Clouser saved his top two choices for the end. He also couldn’t resist including 12, not 10, picks — and we couldn’t resist including all of his favorites.
John Murphy — 28 Days Later (2002)
[John Murphy] also did less horrific movies like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch — he just recently did Guardians of the Galaxy 3. But his score for 28 Days Later — it’s gentle at times, but it’s also sort of murky and menacing. There’s a lot of dark electronic textures, with bursts of violent plodding, distorted guitar elements, and even some sort of melancholy themes with a cleaner guitar sounds. So it doesn’t sound like it’s completely possessed by demons, but it is dark and foreboding and menacing and fits that sense of of an abandoned world that you get from the film.
It’s not just an evil soup of sound, but when it needs to go dark and hard, it does it very well without piling on a ton of elements. He’s able to do a very minimalist arrangement with just a few sounds at a time and really conjure up the right emotion. I remember the first time I saw the movie, I immediately looked up who did it, so I could curse his name for being so good.
Brian Reitzell — 30 Days of Night (2007)
Another quasi-dystopian zombie-ish plot. Brian Reitzell also did the Hannibal TV series and a few other just really sound design-heavy scores, where the crafting of the individual sounds is expertly done — and it doesn’t sound electronic. There’s a lot of bowed metal sounds, which I’m a huge fan of, and dark textures, but overall it really conjures up the sense of being in Alaska, where the sun is not going to rise for another month. Everything is dark, and wherever the flashlight shines, it only reveals a tiny amount of information. The score mirrors that in a really great way.
