What makes horror movie music so scary?
Effective horror film music isn’t just about using a spooky film score that plays when the villain comes on screen. The music in a film is what moves the audience and enhances the emotional expertise. Once paired with the right visuals, a filmmaker can influence and enhance what’s shown on the screen.
The horror genre is regarding raw, visceral feeling. It targets the basic human fears whether that’s rooted in the current cultural anxieties or provoking a person’s fight response.
At Beatoven, we believe music is the language of emotion.
If you are a fan of the genre or have ever been afraid by a horror flick, then you will know horror film music is a crucial component that completes the art.
Minor Keys and Dissonance
Emotional horror is all the rage right now. From movies Hereditary to Get Out, audiences are being pulled into what the characters are feeling during those scary moments on screen.
You can take a piece composed in a major key and transcribe it to a minor key, changing the association of what may have been a happy piece into an ominous one. This creates an uneasy feeling of dissonance, which may be the sensation you wish to create when choosing horror film music.
Dissonant music sounds unstable and conveys a sense of grief and conflict. The reason is that dissonant music often goes unresolved. This refers to how a piece of music typically includes a wise start and an end. With dissonant music, that structure will be lost, thus creating a strained or even anxious feeling.
This is where you wish your audience to be: in a very state of unrest, unsure of what’s to come back.
Using Horror Film Music Sound Effects Like a Pro
It’s not only creepy atmosphere music that makes a horror film terrifying. Sound effects are an enormous part of creating a genuinely scary sound design.
It is necessary that you simply spend time and energy planning where and what kinds of royalty free sound effects you will be using. You’re not going to make an audience jump if the screams are unrealistic and cheesy. Therefore ensuring your sound effects are high quality and convincing is very important.
If you don’t have the instrumentality to record your own horror movie sounds, purchasing royalty free scary music and sound effects is an easy and cost-effective way to go.
Just like royalty free music, you can get sound effects under a usage license and use it as many times as you need. Plus, there are also alternative types of horror movie background music and free sound effects that you simply will use to form your horror project as scary as possible.
Infrasound In Horror Movies: Have You Heard About It?
One way to make that creepy feeling may be a sound design technique that you simply can’t truly hear at all.
There are levels of sound waves that exist outside the vary of the human ear that still have an effect on you. This phenomenon is termed infrasound.
Infrasound in horror movies have sound wave frequencies that are so low your ear can’t pick up on it, but you feel it physically. It will lead to symptoms such as uneasiness, dizziness, and general discomfort.
With this knowledge, horror music composers can effectively make an audience feel fear without them knowing why – enhancing a movie’s visuals and horror film music experience.
Expectations Are made In The Editing Room
Horror music composers play off the audience’s expectations.
Perhaps the foremost necessary feature in making scary horror film music, is however you edit the paragraphs on screen and time them with the sounds in your production.
To illustrate this, let’s walk through some scenarios of how you’ll edit your video and sound to manage the expectation of the audience.
Build Up
If you start to create up an insidious violin screech, the audience is going to expect a scare to come at the end of it.
You could add a frightening action that matches your violins. Or, you may cut that expectation by not ending the sequence with a scare.
The audience is currently on the sting of their seat. You’ve put them in a place of confusion. You’ve disrupted this pattern of the film music matching the mood.
Surprise!
Just when the audience thinks the scary part is over, insert a jump scare sound effect immediately after the violins cut out once the audience isn’t ready.
That being said, you can’t do this for every scare sequence, or else you’ll simply find yourself confusing the viewers.
Take for example 1971’s Carrie and the original Friday the 13th(1980). These filmmakers thought it had been necessary to get one last shot in before credits rolled in order to make sure the audiences left with their heart pumping. The music they overlayed created certain relaxation that they were allowed for just a second before
Finding the Creepy Combination
Sometimes creating that perfect horror scene is all about getting the most terrifying music to go with the scariest pictures.
No tricks here aside for good old fashioned scary movie music.
If you find an excellent collection or composer that does a bang-up job making the sounds and atmosphere that support your vision, you’ve hit the jackpot.
Beatoven is consistently curating and adding in new horror music and effects into our database with the aim of specifically supply horror films.
Adding that extra layer of horror soundtrack to your scenes can almost always produce more fear, creating them more practical and horrifying.
