Keith Emerson’s sound-man at work…
Electronically produced sound has been available to adventurous film composers since the silent era. Among the earliest electronic instruments were the Ondes-Martenot (invented in 1928), which produced a characteristic quivering sound by varying the frequency of oscillation in an array of vacuum tubes, and the trautonium (1930), a monophonic synthesizer-like instrument in which sound generation was based on neon tubes and modulated by the action of fingers on a metal resistor wire.
Later, the clavioline (1947) was the first electronic keyboard instrument to reach a mass market, boasting a five octave range derived from a single tone generator; its rich buzzy timbre can be heard on Joe Meek’s classic single “Telstar” (1962) and the work of jazz maverick Sun Ra. Among the more obscure instruments, the ANS synthesizer (1937) was perhaps the most unusual: created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin, it modified sine waves photoelectronically by means of five glass discs, through which light shines as the player scratches patterns on an outer surface coated with non-drying black mastic. It can be heard on Edward Artemiev’s score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime Solaris (1972) and the Coil album “ANS” (2004).
The Theremin
The earliest and best known of these pioneering instruments is the theremin (developed in 1920), which produces a distinctively eerie tone shifting up and down in pitch according to the position of the operator’s hands in relation to a pair of magnetised antennae. It made its soundtrack debut in a 1931 Soviet film called Odna (“Alone”), for a sequence in which a women gets lost in a furious snowstorm. Miklós Rózsa was the first film composer to use the theremin in the West, in the otherwise orchestral scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound (1945) and Billy Wilder’s drama about alcoholism Lost Weekend (1945). The theremin also turned up in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946) and was incorporated by composer Ferde Grofé into Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950), after which it became strongly associated with science fiction, thanks to Bernard Herrmann’s influential score for Robert Wise’s classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The same year, Dimitri Tiomkin added theremin to his score for Howard Hawks’ The Thing (1951), which could be said to mark the first use of electronic sound in a horror movie.
Spellbound Concerto by Miklós Rózsa: Theremin played by Celia Sheen:
The first film to boast a completely electronic score was Forbidden Planet (1956), featuring sounds created by husband and wife team Louis and Bebe Barron (the latter a student of American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell). During 1952-53 the Barrons worked with John Cage as engineers on his first tape work “Williams Mix”, a four and a half minute piece which took over a year to complete. In 1956, having realised the limited commercial potential of avant-garde composition, they put feelers out to Hollywood and were commissioned to produce twenty minutes of sound effects for Forbidden Planet. When the producers heard the astonishing results they signed the couple up for the whole score. Using a variety of home-built electronic circuits, principally a ‘ring modulator’, the Barrons further manipulated the results by adding reverberation, delay and tape effects. Such was the sheer novelty of their work that, at an early preview of the movie, the audience applauded the sound of the spaceship landing on Altair IV.
Forbidden Planet – spaceship landing:
Alfred Hitchcock turned to electronic sound again in 1963, for his innovative horror film The Birds. This time he decided to dispense with an orchestral score altogether and opted for Oskar Sala’s ‘Mixtur-Trautonium’ to create synthetic birdcalls, along with an abstract electronic soundtrack by Sala and Remi Gassmann.
Alfred Hitchcock with Oskar Sala at the Trautonium
Sala also provided an extraordinary trautonium score to Harald Reinl’s 1963 West-German horror-thriller Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor ( aka The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle).
Distinguished by complex harmonic arrangements of pure electronic sound, and some striking approximations of brass and woodwind, Sala’s music for this better-than-average ‘krimi’ deserves more attention (a twelve minute suite from the film can be found on the Oskar Sala compilation CD “Subharmonische Mixturen”.)
As a side note it’s worth mentioning the controversial, some would say misunderstood, film Anders als du und ich (1957) by Veit Harlan, a German director accused of working for the Nazi propaganda machine during the Second World War. Harlan denied this, claiming that his work had been tampered with by another director at Goebbels’ orders. If true, Harlan was an unlucky man: after WW2 he tried to relaunch his career with Anders als du und ich, which began life as Das dritte Geschlecht (“The 3rd Sex”), a film about the repression of homosexuals. Apparently this too was tampered with, at the instruction of the post-War German censors, to create a diametrically opposite story about the danger of homosexual influences on young men. The reason I mention this? One of the tell-tale signs of homosexuality in the film is an interest in electronic avant-garde music, as represented by none other than Oskar Sala’s Trautonium!
A young man is ‘turned on’ to electronic music in “Anders als du und ich” (1957).
Robert Moog at the controls
In the mid-1960s, American physics graduate and electrical engineer Dr. Robert Moog unveiled an invention that was to revolutionise the field. The first commercially available ‘synthesizer’ as the term is understood today, the ‘Moog’ was smaller, cheaper and far more reliable than previous examples. Before this the only synthesizers in existence were enormous, unwieldy, custom-built machines like the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, installed at Columbia University in 1957. Robert Moog, with the assistance of New York recording engineer Wendy (at the time ‘Walter’) Carlos, launched his first production model – the 900 series – in 1967, with a free demonstration record composed, recorded and produced by Carlos herself. (She created an even greater sensation in 1968 with “Switched on Bach”, an album of synthesized Johann Sebastian Bach pieces, and went on to record music for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining).
Wendy Carlos with Moog 900 circa late 1960s.
1968 was the year in which George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences. And at the heart of this seminal modern horror film, electronic sound is deployed to suggest unutterable horror: when would-be heroic young couple Tom and Judy are killed, and zombies grab handfuls of their entrails in graphic detail, a deep, distorted oscillator drenched in white noise and reverb underlines the severity of the scene and amplifies the taboo-busting power. The rest of the score consists of library orchestral tracks, sometimes slathered in echo to add a hallucinatory edge; only this one key scene utilizes pure electronics. It’s an artistic decision that would reverberate through the genre for years to come, setting the seal on the synthesizer as the instrument of choice for representing abject physical horror.
Tom and Judy devoured, in Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Night of the Living Dead – the zombies eat human flesh:
Meanwhile, synthesizers were rapidly finding a place in rock music. San-Francisco based musicians Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 to demonstrate the Moog, and soon found themselves in demand for studio session work, leading to a recording contract with Warner Brothers and a commission to provide electronic music for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s psychedelic masterpiece Performance (1970). During production of Performance Mick Jagger recorded a Moog score for Kenneth Anger’s 11-minute short Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969); the giant Moog synthesizer seen in the Roeg/Cammell film is the one he used.
Mick Jagger (and Moog) in this rare promo film for Performance:
Keith Emerson of prog-rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer was another early customer; his personal feedback and consultation helped Roberg Moog to refine the instrument and probably paved the way for the Minimoog, a monophonic three-oscillator keyboard synthesizer launched in 1970. Portable and relatively affordable, it was popular with touring rock bands and soon found its way into recording studios used by film composers, thus becoming one of the first synths to feature on low budget movie scores.
A synth highlight from Keith Emerson’s score for Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980):
Prominent among the ‘early adopters’ to make a mark on the genre in the 1970s was Phillan Bishop, whose bleep-and-bloop approach lent avant-garde menace to Thomas Alderman’s The Severed Arm, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil and Chris Munger’s Kiss of the Tarantula.
The Severed Arm, featuring music by Phillan Bishop:
Carl Zittrer also deserves a mention; he went free-form crazy on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and then cohered a little for the superior Deathdream, both for director Bob Clark. By now a pattern was beginning to emerge; synthesizers signified madness, extreme situations, encroaching terror, and the chilly derangement of the psychopath. All of these elements come together in the score to The Last House on the Left, an assortment of country bluegrass tunes augmented by crude but effective electronics (from a Moog and an ARP 2600), played by Steve Chapin and the film’s lead psycho, musician-turned-actor David Hess.
Last House on the Left: Phyllis gets it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c576mmiWKeY
In 1973, Robert Moog associate David Borden was commissioned to record the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s soon-to-be smash The Exorcist. As it turned out, only a minute of his work was used, with Friedkin instead making the inspired if seemingly unlikely choice of Mike Oldfield’s progressive rock epic “Tubular Bells”. The enormous success of The Exorcist, and the impact of “Tubular Bells”, echoed through the film scores of the 1970s, and with synthesizers now part of the furniture in many a recording studio and film post-production suite, an explosion of electronic sound pulsated through the horror genre. In fact not only Mike Oldfield but progressive rock as a whole was a driving force in pushing synthesizers to the forefront of 1970s film composition; bands like Yes, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer deployed electric organs, Minimoogs and towering stacks of ARP and Buchla technology, and this would inspire an Italian band who were to become one of the foremost exponents of electronics in film scoring: Goblin.
Goblin lent innovative jazz-rock stylings to Dario Argento’s brutal, beautiful Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1976), but really hit the musical motherlode on their second Argento collaboration, Suspiria (1977), a tumultuous score built around a circling melody that drags “Tubular Bells” into a cackling synthesized whirlwind.
Their exciting, arpeggiator-driven scores for Luigi Cozzi’s grisly but loveable alien invasion flick Contamination and Joe D’Amato’s sleazy gross-out Beyond the Darkness considerably enhance the films, while the influence of disco (more on that later) supercharges their contribution to Argento’s masterpiece Tenebrae (only three members of Goblin play on this recording, hence the film’s ‘bit-of-a-mouthful’ credit to “Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli”).
The advent of ever more affordable synthesizers locked step with the rise of the slasher movie, and the two proved a match made in low-budget heaven. In 1978, John Carpenter was putting the finishing touches to his third feature, Halloween. There was no way he could afford an orchestral score, but he was a dab hand with a synth (as his previous film Assault on Precinct 13 had shown) so he elected to write and perform the music himself.
The result helped a simple slasher film to become one of the biggest independent hits of the 1970s. For the main theme, Carpenter employed an insistent metronomic pulse, but with a twist; the piano taps out five beats to the bar (shades of prog’ rock again). Meanwhile, the synthesizer provides a rapid ‘ticker-ticker-ticker-ticker’ in the background, creating a jittery sense of things moving at the periphery of your attention, perfectly in keeping with Carpenter’s menacing widescreen framing.
The template set by Halloween would sustain many of Carpenter’s future films, The Fog being an especially wonderful example:
It would inspire a new generation of soundtrack composers; in particular, Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, whose breathtakingly inventive score for Phantasm (1978) drew on avant-garde electronics, progressive rock, Carpenter-style repetition, and even disco (an influential musical form when it comes to movie soundtracks, and one whose leading lights embraced the synthesizer wholeheartedly).
Tim Krog’s score for another surprise low-budget horror hit, Ulli Lommel’s The Boogey Man (1980), also deserves mention for its lush melancholic synth arrangements.
Videodrome (1983) saw Canadian director David Cronenberg’s resident composer, Howard Shore, using a new computer instrument called the Synclavier to blur the line between synthetic orchestrations and a real string section. The resulting ambiguity mirrored the film’s unsettling philosophical core: were the characters having real experiences or hallucinations; were the instruments real, or artificial?
As the 1980s got under way, the sampler emerged as the big new concept in musical composition, and the post-modern fallout of sampling has persisted ever since. One could argue that synthesizers were historicised by the advent of sampling, and it’s difficult now to escape a sense of nostalgia or deliberate quotation of the past when using the classic Moogs or ARPs on record. However, as recent films like Under the Skin (2014) have shown, electronic sound synthesis, whether based in sampling and software manipulation or ‘traditional’ synthesizer programming, continues to offer creative support to the extreme visions of horror and fantasy filmmakers.
The following is a partial list of horror film soundtracks featuring synthesizers either exclusively or prominently. The relevant composer is noted alongside:
1969 – Troika – David Johnson & Fredrick Hobbs
1971 – I Drink Your Blood – Clay Pitts
1971 – Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – Orville Stoeber
1972 – Season of the Witch – Steve Gorn
1973 – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things – Carl Zittrer
1972 – Deathdream – Carl Zittrer
1972 – Last House on the Left – Steve Chapin & David Hess
1972 – The Severed Arm – Phillan Bishop
1973 – Messiah of Evil – Phillan Bishop
1974 – Nude for Satan – Alberto Baldan Bembo
1975 – Deep Red – Goblin
1975 – Kiss of the Tarantula – Phillan Bishop
1976 – Death Trap – Wayne Bell & Tobe Hooper
1976 – The Child – Michael Quatro
1977 – Sex Wish – unknown
1977 – Shock Waves – Richard Einhorn
1977 – Suspiria – Goblin
1977 – Shock – I Libra
1978 – Halloween – John Carpenter
1978 – Phantasm – Fred Myrow & Malcolm Seagrave
1978 – The Alien Factor - Kenneth Walker
1978 – Dawn of the Dead – Goblin
1978 – Terror – Ivor Slaney
1979 – Beyond the Darkness – Goblin
1979 – The Driller Killer – Joe Delia
1979 – Don’t Go in the House – Richard Einhorn
1979 – Zombie Flesh-Eaters – Fabio Frizzi
1979 – Terror Express – Marcello Giombini
1980 – Anthropophagus – Marcello Giombini
1980 – The Beast in Space – Marcello Giombini
1980 – Erotic Nights of the Living Dead – Marcello Giombini
1980 – Cannibal Holocaust – Riz Ortolani
1980 – The Shining – Wendy Carlos
1980 – The Boogey Man – Tim Krog
1980 – Contamination – Goblin
1980 – Fiend – Paul Woznicki
1980 – Forest of Fear – Ted Shapiro
1980 – The Fog – John Carpenter
1980 – Maniac – Jay Chattaway
1980 – City of the Living Dead – Fabio Frizzi
1981 – Strange Behaviour – Tangerine Dream
1981 – Don’t Go in the Woods – H. Kingsley Thurber
1981 – Prey – Ivor Slaney
1981 – Inseminoid – John Scott
1981 – Scanners – Howard Shore
1981 – The House by the Cemetery – Walter Rizzati
1981 – Burial Ground aka Nights of Terror – Berto Pisano
1982 – The Deadly Spawn – Paul Cornell, Michael Perilstein & Kenneth Walker
1982 – Boardinghouse – ‘Teeth’
1982 – Mongrel – Ed Guinn
1982 – Tenebrae – Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli
1983 – The Keep – Tangerine Dream
1983 – Spasms – Tangerine Dream
1983 – Friday the 13th Part 3 – Harry Manfredini & Michael Zager
1983 – Videodrome – Howard Shore
1983 – Xtro – Harry Bromley Davenport
1984 – Don’t Open Till Christmas – Des Dolan
1984 – A Nightmare on Elm Street – Charles Bernstein
1985 – Phenomena – Goblin
Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia.
