By Morgan Potter

Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining has been lauded time and again for its masterful manipulation of the audience’s sense of dread and anticipation even—or especially—when no immediate threat is discernible. How can such scenes fill us with feelings of dread? 

The subtle but highly effective uses of cinematography, sound design, and scoring to evoke the audience’s terror is best exemplified by the suspense of a seemingly innocent scene—a young boy riding his tricycle. The scene begins with Danny riding his small plastic trike, emblematic of childhood innocence, through the empty, yet ostensibly benign halls of the hotel in which the movie is set.

Despite this benevolent setup, almost as soon as the scene begins can the audience be expected to feel a growing suspense; the steadishot used in the scene, placed right behind Danny’s trike as it rolls through the halls, creates an illusion of stillness in the trike as the walls instead rush and close in around us. 

In the beginning, there is no music—there are no sounds emanating from the various rooms of the hotel at all, apart from the clatter of the trike’s plastic wheels; not even the refrigerator buzzes as it flies by.

It is the subtle but expert framing of the scene that leaves the audience in dread, apart from any of the visual content of the scene itself, and while the dread is unmistakable, its source is not, amplifying the effect, punctuated by the brief moments of even greater silence when Danny rides his bike over carpet, in quietly disturbing moments of sensory deprivation.

When music begins, it is a low and quiet melody heralded by a trepidatious ringing, that is slowly overtaken by a wave of the quiet, but cacophonous shivering of violins—the sound like that of a swarm of flies.

When Danny stops his trike in front of room 237, there is nothing apparent in its presence to make us fearful; however, at this moment the strings drip into a disjoint, atonal melody—the music is obscure and unpredictable, evoking a similar fear for whatever lies behind the locked door.

The melody swells and the buzzing grows and it rises and falls like howling wind or distant screams—the ringing returns like blood dripping slowly to a puddle—and then are we finally given a source for our mounting fear—the twin girls that flash before Danny’s eyes before they are gone in an instant, and the music swells with the growing terror and suspense that the we were so carefully primed—by the cinematography, sound, and scoring all together–to experience.

Morgan Potter is a senior majoring in biology and music.

By Emily Banks

In Bride of Frankenstein (1935), “the creation of a female mate for the monster” is the main concern of the film. ¹ The viewer encounters horror with a twist of comedy in this film, which, according to Young, “refracts a series of social anxieties.”

Within this masterwork of horror film and horror film music, composer Franz Waxman supplies the audience with a film score that leads one through a panoply of emotional reactions. From joyful reunions to fits of terror, the film music consistently lends itself to the demands of the picture.

In addition to the familiar use of unprepared and unresolved dissonances and driving rhythmic devices to build tension with the arrival of the film’s titular monsters, Waxman also uses leitmotifs to clearly announce the approach or arrival of specific characters, such as Frankenstein’s creature and his newly-constructed bride.

To create a distinctive sound for the creature’s bride, Waxman utilized church bells upon her introduction in the film, bells that sound similar to the kind typically heard at weddings. This musical device clearly marks her as a bride, which helps to definitively establish her role in the film while simultaneously representing the joy of Frankenstein’s achievement.

Whenever the monster approaches or appears in a threatening manner, Waxman used what William H. Rosar describes as a “simple five-note motif for the monster…which suggests the monster’s growl in the fourth note by having the brass play with flutter-tongue,” and that fourth note in the creature’s motif rests on a dissonant minor second.²

The dissonance creates tension that easily leads the viewer to a feeling of anxiety and a yearning for resolution. An especially clever use of this motif occurs at the very end of the film. As the human baron and (potential) baroness flee the exploding laboratory, we hear the motif played at a much faster tempo, demonstrating the danger the monster is in.

Once the building has been destroyed, we hear the motif one final time, but instead of finishing the melodic idea, Waxman instead leaves it unresolved and moves into a consonant melody ending on a major chord, giving the viewer a feeling of finality and resolution and allowing us to conclude that the monster has at last been destroyed, and normalcy has been restored…at least until the next sequel.

Emily Banks is a senior music major from Austin, Texas. At Davidson College she participates in the Davidson College Chorale, Collegium Musicum, and voice lessons.

¹Elizabeth Young, “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding, Gender, and Race in Bride of Frankenstein,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 2015), 361.

²“Music for the Monsters: Universal Pictures’ Horror Film Scores of the Thirties,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 40/4 (1983), 409.

By Will Messner

Films in the 1920s were accompanied by live music; the music would have been performed by a solo pianist, an organist, or a small orchestra, depending on the venue and the available musicians.

There were collections of pre-composed music, called photoplay music, that could be used typical scenes that would come up over and over again, like music for chases or music for sneaking around or music for death scenes.

Some of the photoplay collections included generic stereotypical music for anything regarded as exotic and non-Western. For example, volume one of the Sam Fox Moving Picture Music (1918), and there were even collections devoted just to exotic stereotypes, like Jacobs’ Piano Folio of Oriental, Spanish, and Indian Music for Racial and National Atmosphere (1917). (See figures 1 and 2 below.)

These stereotypical cues often used the same interval of the augmented second to mark something as generally Middle Eastern or Asian.

German director F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized re-telling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula made nearly a decade before Hollywood cast Bela Legosi in the titular role; Hans Erdmann’s score, which was played live with the film when it was first released, has exotic sounds that trigger an abject feeling that transports us to the land of ghosts.

As Hutter, our protagonist, begins his travels to Count Orlock’s castle early in the movie, a pan-flute like recurrent musical motif begins to play. This motif creates tension due to the repetition and monotony of the exotic sounding melody; this theme gets gradually faster as the speed of the horses increases.

Soon after the men driving the carriage refuse to take Hutter further, the motif stops and is replaced by minor orchestral melodies as Count Orlock (actually the vampire Nosferatu) arrives to drive Hutter the rest of the way up to the castle. 

When he and his horses come into the scene, the motif returns with the same instrumentation, although it is nearly double the original tempo. At the end of the scene, Orlock leaves Hutter, and as Orlock and his horses leave, the motif comes back and rapidly trails off until Orlock is out of view.  This choice to have the exotic motif leave with the monster is a clever choice of association. The recurrent motif, one utilizing musical markers of exoticism, was meant to be for Nosferatu because he is the monster. 

William Messner is a Senior Music Major and Digital Studies Minor at Davidson College who plans on working in the Music Industry after Graduation.

By Emery Nash

The film scholar Robin Wood defined horror film as when “normality is threatened by the Monster.”[1] In early horror films, such as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), the monster often took the form of a literal monster. Sometimes these monster had racial characteristics.

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when Dr. Jekyll transforms to personify his worst qualities, director Rouben Mamoulian chose an ape-like caricature—Hyde was sexually deviant and violent—that drew from frequently repeated stereotypes of African Americans. This representation of Hyde drew critics’ attention: a writer in the New York Times wrote that “the face of the handsome young [man]…becomes…a sabre-toothed baboon with pig eyes.”[2]

This evidence, paired with a changing musical score–from the Baroque organ associated with Dr. Jekyll, to English music hall drinking songs paired with Hyde—signifies a “dichotomy between nobility and brutishness…Hyde is…a savage who cannot…adapt…[to] Victorian Society.”[3]

Together, these facts indicate racist undertones in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s musical and cinematic elements.

Emery Nash is a native of Nashville, TN and is a current senior at Davidson College. He is majoring in Biology and Music, and hopes to have a career in social justice, focusing on marginalized populations in American society.

[1] Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood (Festival of Festivals, 1979), 14.

[2] Virginia Wright Wexman, “Horrors of the Body: Hollywood’s Discourse on Beauty and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: After One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 284.

[3] Siegbert Salomon Prawer, “Book into Film I: Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in Caligari’s Children: The Film as a Tale of Terror (University of California Press, 1981), 86-107.

By Max Lilburn

In his 1919 essay The Uncanny, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud theorized that things that are uncanny consist of a combination of familiarity and strangeness—things that we sort of recognize, but sort of don’t.

The doppelganger, an uncanny double of a person, features prominently in Freud’s theory as an example to illustrate the uncanny; in confronting a slightly different version of ourselves, we are forced to confront our own fears of mortality and death.^[1] For this reason, doppelgangers are a common feature of horror cinema and are a central thematic element of the film discussed here.

In an especially chilling scene from Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 horror masterpiece Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the uncanny is manifested through music. Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll’s terrifying doppelganger, forces Ivy to sing a song that was introduced only a few scenes earlier in a much more joyous context.

In this way, the audience becomes familiar with the lively tune; it is exuberantly sung out to a smiling crowd in a lively bar, and we associate it with Ivy’s delightfully radiant demeanor.

But in the context of Mr. Hyde’s bedroom, the song becomes jarringly and unbearably uncanny. Ivy herself cannot finish the tune without breaking down, and in this way, Mr. Hyde’s evil becomes apparent. While his counterpart, the noble Dr. Jekyll, summons forth Bach’s pious and upstanding Toccata and Fugue in D Minor with his own two hands at the opening of the film, Mr. Hyde can only force music into existence through his battered victim.

But in Hyde’s presence, nothing beautiful is left uncorrupted. The song, like Ivy’s life, is tragically cut short, and the terrible uncanniness of the music leaves a lasting impression in the mind of the viewer.

Max Lilburn is a senior music major and guitarist at Davidson College. He is the recipient of the 2018 Wilmer Hayden Walsh Prize in Composition and recently released an EP that can be found anywhere music is streamed. Max has a strong interest in songwriting and production and hopes to pursue them as a career after graduation.

[1] Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books 2003).

By Andrew Wright

Known in the Middle Ages as the “Diabolus in musica” (the devil in music), the tritone has historically evoked an unsettled and ambiguous feeling. It rubs us the wrong way because of its dissonant nature.

Being six semitones away and the 6^th step in the circle of fifths away from the tonic – perhaps a symbolic connection to the devil’s number, 666 – it is ideally positioned so that moving but one step in either direction leads to a consonant and more satisfying interval.

As Janet Halfyard writes in an essay tracing the use of tritones in horror comedies, “harmonically speaking, [the tritone is] as far from grace as one can fall; if C were the tonic in a major scale, 6 steps away positions it as the furthest interval in either direction.”[1]

Some listeners might recognize the tritone from its use by Leonard Bernstein in “Maria” from West Side Story.

The tritone, through its dissonance and symbolic association with evil, has historically been considered an important strategy used in horror film scores to bring the audience along an unsettling journey and to emulate and embody the monster or Otherness.

Given its unsettling nature and its symbolism for the devil, the tritone is a frequently used tool in horror film scores to create anxiety-making settings and to represent the unnatural. It’s particularly common in parody-horror films, as Halfyard eloquently discusses, because of its ridiculousness to an almost comedic affect.

Unlike parody-horror, classic horror films are sometimes composed atonally, following Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method and the Second Viennese School method. Benjamin Frankel’s score for The Curse of the Werewolf offers one example of that.

The tritone amidst so many other disruptive and unnatural sounding intervals and chords becomes somewhat redundant and less effective in these instances (Halfyard, 24). Nevertheless, horror still finds effective uses of the devil’s interval, as occurs in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Returning to the tritone’s use in horror comedy, consider Marc Shaiman’s waltz-theme from the 1991 horror/black comedy film based on the earlier television sitcom, The Addams Family. Shaiman’s elegant waltz starts in F minor and then moves to an unexpected G# minor, which introduces a B natural into the harmony. F and B are a tritone interval away, which helps to embody the eccentric parody interpretations that Gomez and Morticia Addams play on classic horror film villains.

 The lydian scale, minor key harmonic modulations, and the whole tone scale are three strategies that employ the tritone. The lydian mode creates the interval of a tritone with the first note of the scale by raising its fourth note, sounding then like a major scale but with a raised fourth scale degree. Halfyard further observes that John William’s main title for The Witches of Eastwick (1987) incorporates this mode effectively as he disguises the innocent folk melody just as Jack Nicholson’s character does his own innocence (Halfyard, 28).  Halfyard also points to minor key tritone harmonic modulations in John Debney’s score for Hocus Pocus (1993) (Halfyard, 30).

Danny Elfman frequently uses this technique in relation to demonic characters or situations, perhaps none as effectively as in The Frighteners (1996) and Beetlejuice (1988).

Next time you hear an eerie, unnatural sounding interval, tune in and see if you can pick out a tritone!

Andrew Wright, a senior at Davidson College, is studying Economics and Music. A trumpet player of 12 years and a composer of less than one, Andrew performs and composes music influenced by numerous styles, but all focusing largely around jazz. He has accepted a job for after he graduates as a digital marketing analyst at Red Ventures in Charlotte, NC.

[1] “Mischief Afoot: Supernatural Horror-comedies and the Diabolus in Musica,” from Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, edited by Neil Lerner (Routledge, 2010), 23.

By Siân Lewis

Deriving from the traditional Danish ballad Elveskud, the myth of Erlkönig – often translated as Elfking – tells the story of a young boy nearing death. The delirious boy, who is frantically carried by his father on horseback, becomes increasingly aware of another being – the Erlkönig – who is calling for him. After his father’s reassurance that all is well, the son cries out that he has been attacked. The poem ends with the father realizing that his son is dead.

The piece has been set to music by several composers over the years, but Schubert’s rendition, composed in 1815, is one of the most highly acclaimed. Although a traditional Lied, Schubert’s composition uncovers some of the same techniques that are often employed within horror film music today.

A common mood evoked in horror music is sadness, fear, and trauma, and minor key signatures have long aided in the art of emotional turmoil – the Jaws theme for the shark, in A minor, and the Saw theme piece, in D minor, are famous examples of this. Erlkönig is no exception to this rule.

Erlkönig shifts through a set of keys that are not commonly associated with each other – G minor, B minor, C# minor – which add to the overall feeling of tension and trauma that is often attributed to the genre of horror.

Schubert takes this further however, using major keys – Bb major, C major and Eb major – to depict the call of the Erlkönig as he lures the small boy to his death, an action that remains reminiscent of the horrific. If this was not strange enough, Schubert adds the flattened submediant during the young child’s calls, adding a darker and more disturbing sound.

Neil Lerner’s preface to Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear highlights film scholar Robin Wood’s earlier exploration of the way that Schubert (among others) investigates “taboo topics through various levels of subterfuge and subtext” (ix) and how even a work like Erlkönig is an important antecedent of the horror film genre.

Indeed, the concept of writing a song for a Goethe poem that hints at not only death, but also at a supernatural force that creates fear, anxiety, and leads to a child’s death, provides us a striking example of the kinds of earlier artworks that lead up to horror film. Therefore, although Erlkönig is not an example of music from a horror film, it is an important precursor to the narratives that horror film, and horror music, will take up and develop more than a century later.

Siân Lewis is a senior Music and Political Science double major from England. Primarily a vocalist, she is a member of the Davidson College Chorale and The Davidson College Nuances (a cappella) and has recently released an EP of original songs that she recorded and co-produced at Davidson.