Horror... Is there a more satisfying canvas for a film composer? Editing of course plays a large part in what makes Horror films so scary, not to mention the special effects. But what would a Horror film be without music? Whether it gets under your skin, or makes you jump out of it, Horror film scores represent some of the most thrilling music written for the screen. But who does it best?
There are plenty of big names who have dabbled, but aren’t on the list. The hugely influential Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Sisters, It’s Alive) and Lalo Schifrin (The Manitou, The Amityville Horror, Abominable) dipped their toes into the genre and created cult classics. Composers like James Horner and Carter Burwell cut their teeth in horror; Horner scored The Hand, Humanoids from the Deep and Wolfen before he hit the big time, while one of Burwell’s earliest scores was for Psycho III.
Even the likes of Hans Zimmer and John Williams have delved – Zimmer with Hannibal (2001) and The Ring (2002), Williams with The Fury (1978) and Dracula (1979). Then there’s Philip Glass, whose 1992 score for Candyman remains a fan favourite, while Danny Elfman thrilled us with Nightbreed (1990), The Frighteners (1996) and Sleepy Hollow (1999).
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There are composers, though, who have made their name with horror, or set its benchmarks. Here’s our top 13…
Greatest horror film composers of all time
13. Colin Stetson (b1975)
The American reeds maestro might be a go-to instrumentalist for the likes of Bon Iver and Arcade Fire, but he’s also great at scaring the pants off of film audiences. It was his unsettlingly atmospheric soundscape forHereditary (2018) that brought him acclaim – indeed we named it as one of our 13 most terrifying horror film scores. Music from his score for The Menu (2022) was performed at the 2024 BBC Proms, while the likes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) and Hold Your Breath (2024) have only proven that Stetson really knows how to make us shudder.
12. Mark Korven
While Canadian composer and multi-instrumentalist Mark Korven has been scoring film and television since the 1980s, it’s only in the last decade that he has had a more prominent voice. His earliest forays into horror included an episode of the late ’80s reboot of The Twilight Zone and the sci-fi horror The Cube (1997), but it was the 2015 folk-horror film The Witch that caught listeners’ attention.
That score (also in our top 13 horror scores) is an inspired mix of clawing strings and howling vocals, and it led onto further striking scores from Korven. Our House (2018), In the Tall Grass (2018), The Lighthouse (2019), The Black Phone (2021) and The First Omen (2024), are just a sample of the other chilling soundtracks he has penned.
11. Graeme Revell (b1955)
It’s actually a little while since we’ve heard from this New Zealand-born composer, but his is a gruesomely strong filmography of horrors. Revell started his Hollywood career with a pair of Horror sequels in 1990: Child’s Play 2 and Psycho IV: The Beginning. He returned to the former franchise with 1998’s Bride of Chucky, which itself followed a slew of cult hits such as The Crow (1994), The Craft (1996), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Spawn (1997).
A founding member of the Kiwi band SPK, he made his debut down under with the Australian thriller Dead Calm (1989). With a background in rock and some time as a horn player, Revell’s scores are unsurprisingly eclectic. His horror CV also includes the 2005 remake of The Fog and 2003’s Freddy vs Jason (bringing together the lead villains of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th).
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10. Howard Shore (b1946)
You might think of Hobbits rather than Horror when it comes to this Oscar-winning Canadian composer. True, Middle-earth occupied a large chunk of Shore’s time in scoring two trilogies of Tolkien films for director Peter Jackson. But his other great director partnership is with David Cronenberg; indeed Shore’s first score was for The Brood (1979) and was followed by a string of cult ‘body horror’ shockers.
Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991): each was vividly scored by Shore, and together they secure his place on this list. Shore also gave us The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Seven (1995), a pair of delectable almost-Horrors, while his new score for Cronenberg, The Shrouds (2024) is eagerly awaited.
9. Harry Manfredini (b1943)
If you’re a horror fan than Manfredini’s name will be oh-so familiar. The American composer (and sax player) presided over one of the great Hollywood slasher franchises for over 20 years. Indeed Friday the 13th is up there with Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street in terms of its classic status, and Manfredini’s music played an integral part in giving us the creeps in all but one of the original run of films.
Though he has written in other genres, Horror has had something of a strangle hold over the composer, who also composed music for 1982’s Swamp Thing, The Hills Have Eyes: Part II (1984), the House franchise (1985-92) and Wishmaster (1997), among others. His contribution to the genre, via the many messy adventures of Jason Voorhees, earns him a comfortable place on our list.
8. James Bernard (1925-2001)
The name of this Horror master might not be so familiar to the average filmgoer, but any real fans of the genre will know that James Bernard was the king of Hammer Horror scores. Bernard can count both Britten and Howells as mentors in one way or another, and he brought a keen musicianship to some of British cinema’s great movie monsters.
Starting with 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, Bernard went on to score Hammer classics like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and their various blood-drenched sequels. He continued to compose right through the 1970s and even wrote a new score for FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu in 1997.
7. Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004)
One of the greatest Hollywood composers of all time, Jerry Goldsmith’s CV is packed with every kind of film (and score) you can imagine. His ability to jump from genre to genre, style to style, is evidence of his talent, not to mention his dramatic vision. Horror was no different, approached as seriously as an intimate drama; he won an Oscar for The Omen (1976) and penned thrilling scores for its two sequels Damien: Omen II (1978) and The Final Conflict (1981).
Goldsmith also dared to follow Bernard Herrmann with the score for the under-appreciated Psycho II (1982). But that’s not all, add two Poltergeist films, two Gremlins films, a film about a murderous chimp (1986’s Link) and a terrifying ventriloquist’s dummy (1978’s Magic) and you’ve got quite the unnerving resumé. And that’s before you even mention Sci-fi/Horror classic, Alien (1979) and his final Horror, The Haunting (1999).
6. Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)
The name is iconic enough and, like Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone could turn his hand to anything. Among his masterworks for the screen, written for Italian and Hollywood cinema, is a host of brilliantly realised Horror scores.
Morricone famously worked with Italian master of gore Dario Argento on a handful of films, perhaps most notably The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). 1971 saw Morricone take on four grizzly titles, including Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet. In Hollywood he delivered a rather beautiful score for Exorcist II: The Heretic, added scintillating depth to John Carpenter’s The Thing(1982) and eerie romance to Mike Nichols’s Wolf (1994), among others.
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5. Pino Donaggio (b1941)
Like Morricone, Pino Donaggio has enjoyed a varied film career in his native Italy and in Hollywood. His breakout film score was, though, for the classic British chiller Don’t Look Now (1973). Donaggio’s former life as a violinist and pop singer gave him a broad range on screen, though Horror has reared its head more often than not. Again, like Morricone, the composer enjoyed a string of projects with director Dario Argento – notably Tourist Trap (1979), Trauma (1993) and Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005).
Donaggio has also had a longterm collaboration with US director Brian de Palma, who turned to the composer after the death of Bernard Herrmann. De Palma had worked with Herrmann on both Sisters and Obsession, and would surely have invited him to score Carrie (1976) had he not died in 1975. Donaggio did the honours for that classic, and followed it with further genre favourites like Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981). His more recent efforts include Seed of Chucky (2004) and Patrick (2013).
4. Marco Beltrami (b1966)
This American composer studied with the late, great Jerry Goldsmith and has an impressive record when it comes to Horror. Beltrami first came to prominence when he scored Wes Craven’s brilliantly self-referential Scream in 1996. He would score the three sequels in the franchise’s original run and be called on for a number of glossy Horrors, including The Faculty (1998), Resident Evil (2002) and Cursed (2005).
From original scares like Mimic (1997) and World War Z (2013) to big-budget remakes and sequels – The Omen (2006), The Thing (2011), Carrie (2013) and The Nun II (2023), Beltrami has done it all. Further Beltrami frightfest’s include Netflix’s popular Fear Street trilogy (2021), A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020) and the brilliant gothic horror The Woman in Black (2011).
3. John Carpenter (b1948)
Talk about a one-man-band… Carpenter is behind some of Horror’s most familiar titles, including Halloween(1978), The Fog (1980), Halloween II (1981), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), They Live (1988), Body Bags (1993), Village of the Damned (1995), John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) and Ghosts of Mars (2001). That he not only co-wrote, directed and scored them is quite the achievement.
Ennio Morricone may have done the lion’s share of the work on 1982’s The Thing, but Carpenter inserted additional hues of his own. He made a triumphant return to Halloween in 2018, rebooting the franchise with a further three films starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He once again provided the music, this time with his son, Cody. Carpenter’s music has a cult following and the composer has toured with it, not to mention enjoyed a string of album collections of his works. A living legend. A true Horror maestro.
2. Joseph Bishara (b1970)
If modern Horror has a name, then it might well be Joseph Bishara. The American composer has been scaring us half to death for some 20 years or more, though it was 2010’s Insidious that made his name on the big screen (he even made a cameo). Experimental, and brilliantly inventive, Bishara continues to find new ways to get under our skin.
His CV features some of the genre’s most popular and successful titles, including all of the Insidioussequels, The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016) and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), Annabelle (2014) and Annabelle Comes Home (2019), The Curse of La Llorona (2019), Malignant (2021) and 2024’s Tarot. There are many many more besides, proving without doubt that Joseph Bishara is the master of 21st-century Horror film scoring.
Greatest film composers of all time: and the greatest is...
1. Christopher Young (b1958)
American composer Christopher Young has been giving us the creeps for over 40 years. His early scores include The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982) and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge(1985). That hotly anticipated sequel was something of a calling card, Young going on to roll out a run of scores with big themes and a whole lot of musical imagination. Hellraiser (1987) remains one of Young’s greatest works, the composer unleashing hell with broad orchestral strokes. He followed it with a cracking sequel score for Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) and squeezed in Flowers in the Attic (1987) in between.
His score for The Fly II (1989) is gorgeous in places, and Hider in the House (1989) a classic of the genre. Then what? Species (1995), Urban Legend (1998), The Grudge (2004), Drag Me to Hell (2009), Sinister (2012), Pet Sematary (2019), The Empty Man (2020)… they just kept on coming and there are so many more we don’t have room to mention. Suffice to say, Christopher Young is the unmatched master of Horror film mjsic, and his new score for FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu is an orchestral treat that proves that he has lost none of his flair for thrills and chills.
Honorable Mentions…
A list like this is difficult to curate and there are many more fiendishly fine composers to consider. Check out Richard Band (Puppet Master, 1989), Roque Baños (Evil Dead, 2013), Tyler Bates (The Devil’s Rejects, 2005), Benjamin Wallfisch (It, 2017), Fernando Velázquez (Devil, 2010), Abel Korzeniowski (The Nun, 2018), John Ottman (House of Wax, 2005), Charles Bernstein (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984) and Joe Renzetti (Child’s Play, 1988) who have written some corkers.
