Best Horror Movie Soundtracks — Top 10 Scary Good Scores

With the Omen soundtrack, blockbuster composer Jerry Goldsmith asks the question, what’s scarier than Gregorian chants? He then subsequently answers that question: not much.

Perfectly supplementing the Gothic terror of The Omen, Goldsmith’s soundtrack is filled with bombastic choral arrangements that overwhelm the viewer with religious dread. The opening song, “Ave Satani” (I’ll let you guess what that means), is a tune fit for the king of the underworld himself.

The Annihilation soundtrack, like the film itself, defies boundaries. It’s alternatingly discordant humming, blasted out synths, idyllic folk guitar, ambient noise, or an ungodly mix of all of the above.

Composers Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow (of Portishead fame) created music for Annihilation that can best be summed up with one word: disorienting. The score is consistently chilling, even at its most beautiful. Similar to the world of Annihilation, the soundtrack has an ominous yet ineffable darkness that lingers throughout its various forms.

Howard Shore’s soundtrack for Videodrome feels timeless, a beguiling mix of analogue orchestration and synth wizardry. The opening track still sounds ahead of its time, utilizing percussive glitched-out samples over discordant synthesizers reminiscent of a Oneohtrix Point Never track.

The score mimics the unsettling eroticism of David Cronenberg’s masterpiece, equal parts seductive and eerie, alluring and foreboding. Never before or since has a score so successfully encapsulated the body horror genre.

The understated nature of most of It Follows’ horror requires a terrifying soundtrack to augment it. This is what Disasterpeace provided, through rich synthesizer landscapes which swell into distorted waves of terror throughout the film’s runtime.

What makes Disasterpeace’s soundtrack stand out, however, is how it also perfectly captures the coming-of-age throughline that’s as important to It Follows as the film’s scares. Listen to “Jay” and you'll be transported into a melancholy adolescent nostalgia, all while a distant horror hangs overhead.

There is perhaps no opening theme as unsettling as that of Rosemary’s Baby. Mia Farrow’s soft la la la’s over low strings and an echoing plucked guitar. Sounds nice, right? Wrong — it’s terrifying.

Most of Krzysztof Komeda’s score follows this formula; music that in theory shouldn’t be creepy but for some reason… undeniably is. As Roman Polanski’s film slowly delves from unnerving to openly horrific, the music does as well, with squawking trumpets and dissonant choirs leading us toward hell.

Hitchcock’s Psycho is one of the most important films of all time. A film which permanently changed what Hollywood thought a horror movie could and should be. Bernard Herrmann’s score is no small part of that.

Just like the film itself, Herrmann’s score starts relatively unassuming, though twinges of darkness seep into its lilting melodies. Of course, everything changes with the stabbing. The strings stab right along with the knife, helping create one of the most memorable scares in cinema history that horror films and scores have been trying to imitate ever since.

It’s a testament to Herrmann’s undeniable prowess that Psycho might not be his greatest score. But it surely is his most influential.

The Suspiria theme is one of the few horror soundtracks that, while scary, is also just a great rock song. 

Giallo godfather Dario Argento recruited Italian prog-rock band Goblin to score his greatest film. And the band lives up to its name, creating a devilish rock-horror anthem that, no joke, has vocals chanting “witch” over rollicking guitar grooves.

Goblin’s Suspiria soundtrack shows that a horror score doesn’t need to be atmospheric dread, it can also jam.

It wasn’t enough for John Carpenter to simply produce, direct, and co-write Halloween. He also had to score it. The game-changing Slasher film was made on a shoestring budget, and so Carpenter, without the funds to hire a composer or orchestra, used a piano and a synthesizer to score the entire movie.

The result is a theme which is an instant classic: pulsing singular piano notes backed by a twitching click track, then underscored by throbbing synthetic brass. The simplicity of the Halloween soundtrack is its superpower, worming its way into your head and staying there.

The Shining’s opening scene is a study in the power of a score. Without sound, we’re seeing a family drive through a beautiful mountainscape, perhaps for a fun vacation. With Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s theme, it is all but certain this family is heading into the bowels of hell.

This is juxtaposition at its finest.

Wendy Carlos was at the forefront of electronic music innovation, and had already worked with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange. The Shining sees her further refining warped synthetic soundscapes to great effect, even though Kubrick only uses two of her songs. The rest of the soundtrack is taken from preexisting classical pieces written by the likes of György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki.

The Shining provides a shining (wink) example of musical direction, not limiting itself to any one composer, but rather picking and choosing songs to create the perfect horror collage.

By 1982, there was no question John Carpenter knew how to write a horror soundtrack. Even so, for The Thing he tapped legendary composer Ennio Morricone to score what would be a crowning masterpiece.

Carpenter, always a man of few words, gave the composer one guiding direction: “fewer notes.” Morricone then used a sublime combination of orchestra and synthesizer to create what can only be described as frozen fear. The soundtrack is droning, swelling then dissipating, underscoring the paranoia endemic in the film.

How's this for some trivia? Morricone wrote so much music for The Thing that he used what was left on the cutting room floor for The Hateful Eight, which won him an Oscar for Best Score. When your scraps are receiving Oscars, you know you’re onto something. 

Up Next

Best Horror Movies of All Time

Beyond their scores, all the movies on this list are fantastic, but if you’re looking for more great horrors, check out our definitive list of the best ever. You’re guaranteed to be spooked.

Up Next: Best Horror Movies →