Research: The Importance Of Music In Horror Films

Last lesson, we were asked to write down what came into our minds whilst listening to several famous horror film scores which included Jaws, A Nightmare On Elm Street and Psycho.

Sound is often overlooked in films but it is often the single most important element in setting the mood for the scene. Music has the ability to set the tone for how events will unfold. Music may progressively build to signify that a dramatic event is about to happen or it may be upbeat to lighten the mood. Horror films rely heavily in sound clips to create a scary scene. We do not think about it but if one were to remove the sound from a horror film its fear factor would decrease dramatically.

For many years, film-makers have opted for disturbing soundtracks to heighten suspense and horror. As for Jaws, its theme creates a sinister feeling of suspense with its chilling, crescendoing minor chords. Scientists think they know why the music utilized in horror movies is so good at making our flesh creep. 

Indeed, they have shown that the harsh, discordant and unexpected sounds used in horror soundtracks imitate the screams of frightened animals. The leading scientist on this study, Daniel Blumstein, is an expert on animal distress calls. While studying yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado, Blumstein noticed that baby marmots often screamed when researchers caught them. In scientific jargon, such screams are classified as "non-linear chaotic noise." Blumstein first explored the link between such non-linear noise and scary music in a 2010 study of movie soundtracks. He discovered that horror scores made heavy use of such sounds, and, in films like The Shining, even used recordings of animal screams. Such non-linear sounds - a dissonant chord, a child's cry, a baby animal's scream - trigger a biologically ingrained response by making us think our young are threatened, according to Blumstein's study.

Later on, he carried out an experiment to demonstrate music's effectiveness on the human's brain. Participants were asked to rate the music segments based on how emotionally stimulating they were and what kind of emotion they evoked. Just as Blumstein predicted, participants ranked the music with -elements more stimulating and linked it to strongly negative emotions such as fear.

Researchers also found that musical clips where the melodies suddenly became higher provoked greater emotional stimulation than moments when the notes suddenly went lower. This, Blumstein believes, may also be linked to the study of animal calls: a marmot’s scream goes higher when the marmot’s vocal cords go tenser, and this tenseness would likely occur when the animal is scared.

In the next stage of the study, participants were asked to watch objectively boring videos (of activities like drinking coffee or reading a book) paired with the non-linear music. Participants found the same distorted music much less emotionally stimulating (and much less scary) when it went along with a boring video. This finding suggests that visual stimuli may trump audio stimuli in prompting emotional reactions (and why the chord in the trailer might be more striking when it’s synced with the image of the girl getting yanked under).

Finally, the point of a horror film is to scare the viewer. Music is the biggest contributor to getting the viewer’s adrenaline pumping because it sets the tone before any events actually occur. The viewer can feel scared before any events transpire based on how effectively and artistically music is utilized.