What Happened To Horror Movie Theme Songs?

gamerant.com:

There might be no genre of cinema more dependent on sound than horror, which is often entirely dependent on the strategic application of silence and noise to evoke its reactions. Many of the most iconic horror moments of cinema history would be vastly inferior if they were robbed of their distinctive score.

Almost all the horror franchises that have dozens of iterations and stand the test of time feature a single central piece of music that serves as their theme song. In the modern day, however, most new entries in the long history of horror film eschew this idea and wind up lacking.

Why The Music In Suspiria Is So Effective

Everyone has a different tune in their head when they hear the open phrase «horror movie theme song». Maybe it's the bizarre 10/8 time signature piano riff of John Carpenter's theme from his original 1978 Halloween. Perhaps it's the slow nursery rhyme-esque dirge of «one, two, Freddie's coming for you» that heralds in the horror of A Nightmare on Elm Street. When John Williams wrote the groundbreaking slow build theme to Steven Spielberg's Jaws, he single-handedly codified what a killer shark sounds like for all time. Harry Manfredini's bizarre score for Friday the 13th adapted that into an even stranger sound and applied it to a masked slasher. Perhaps the best modern take on this idea would be the Saw franchise. Composer Charlie Clouser crafted an incidental piece of music called «Hello Zepp» to give the film a tense ending. When the film did well enough to warrant several sequels, the filmmakers realized that they had gold on their hands and remixed that track for each film.

There are still horror movie franchises over the past few years and many of them still have great musical scores. Composer