Age of dread: How modern horror became a proving ground for experimental sound

Horror cinema encourages composers to play more freely than almost any other genre. With its creeping dominion across independent cinema and blockbusters alike, modern horror has become a playground for some of the most exciting, experimental artists shaping the sound of fear.

Primary-coloured synth arpeggios, so bright they burn your eardrums. Electronics imitating a deadly swarm of bees. Violins shuddering through a vortex. A deathly lullaby played on a child’s recorder. Human voices warped and pitch-shifted into something chilling and otherworldly.

These varied sounds of dread and terror have become essential to contemporary horror cinema, home to some of the most exciting, dynamic soundtracks in modern film. True to the lineage of the genre, they are also largely created by experimental artists, with the likes of Mica Levi and Colin Stetson following in the footsteps of Wendy Carlos and Krzysztof Komeda. The sonic variety of these works suggests that musicians are responding more to ideas of tension and suspense than to traditions of film composition – whether orchestral or electronic. “I’m really interested in any sounds that feel visceral, that feel like they are in your everyday, but are completely unpredictable,” says Hannah Peel, who was initially drawn to the “freedom” of composing for film and TV outside of the mainstream. “I remember telling a commercial TV producer when first starting out that I would be sampling this creaky door that sounded like the growls of a pig for a beat. It wasn’t met with much enthusiasm, even though I knew it would sound amazing! In horror, it’s different. That sort of creative play is welcomed.”

Some modern horror scores work as a kind of uncanny-valley take on traditional scoring. Like Wendy Carlos’ electronic transpositions of classical music for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s score for Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) uses established forms to evoke the sense of skewed reality that lurks at the heart of much horror cinema. “Lowe’s music embodies much of the mid-20th-century avant-garde classical world, but works sound very hard through multiple electroacoustic processes,” explains Elizabeth Bernholz, whose singular work as Gazelle Twin encompasses scores alongside solo albums that share a strong sense of narrative and suspense. “In Candyman, Lowe really ekes out the uncanny through voice and sound.” Established timbres slowly warp and change: choral refrains become wails; orchestral instrumentation atomises and reforms into something bizarre, like bees taking human form in the film.

Bernholz’s own horror scores – including Nocturne (2020) and The Power (2021), co-composed with Max de Wardener – also stem from “a non-traditional approach to traditional form and instrumentation”. A recurring instrument is the humble recorder, which she initially used as a reference to early music for her 2018 album Pastoral, transforming its sound into loops and textures. She returned to this versatile instrument when scoring the supernatural horror Black Cab (2024), hinting at a British folk horror tradition stretching back to The Wicker Man. For the dark comedy The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford (2026), her score uses recorders “in all kinds of contexts, from neo-baroque Mellotron-driven passages to diegetic fake fantasy TV music to disturbing, murky drones”. 

Peel also revels in this transgressive approach when scoring anything from TV horror adaptation The Midwich Cuckoos (2022) to the disquieting Irish thriller Bring Them Down (2024). “Anywhere I can blend a traditional style of scoring with something jarring is a lot of fun,” Peel says. “So, from scratchy extended bowing techniques on strings, to manipulating the rattles of an old electric heater, anything goes. I find that aural subversion exciting.” The techniques Peel employs for scoring horror are also applied to music written for the documentary Underland (2025), which explores subterranean spaces, from sinkholes to abandoned Cold War bunkers. Peel emphasises the fear of proximity to such unknown places by juxtaposing familiar sounds of drums and strings with growls and scrapes of uncertain origin, or assembling a duet between a church choir and a drone. This occupation of a sonic netherworld is reminiscent of Mica Levi’s Under the Skin (2013), one of the defining works of modern horror sound, which effectively evokes the film’s sense of alien unease.

Peel also utilises the unsettling potential of the human voice for Underland, sampling and manipulating it into inhuman shapes. She cites Mark Korven’s score for The Witch (2015) as a favourite: “The manipulated sounds and the use of voice and choir with acoustic instrumentation is next-level terror.” Like other vocalists composing for horror – Lucrecia Dalt’s music for Rabbit Trap (2025) is a fine example – Bernholz treats her voice as “an endless resource to draw from” across all her work, using it in both starkly unadorned form and as the raw material for electronic manipulation. Her score for Nocturne is built from a breathy sample of her voice. “It’s used throughout as ambient, dreamlike sound beds, or heavily distorted and stretched out into wild, imposing, supernatural drones,” she explains. “I think we tend to feel dread in our bones, chest and gut, so I opt for acoustic instruments above digital to begin with – especially instruments that are played using breath – because I think these can emulate those sensations more closely.” She also creates electronic beats, bass and percussive sounds using noises formed by her body (“tapping on teeth, slapping or stroking skin”) – another resourceful way to lend the music “a physical sense you just cannot get from plugins”, and appropriate for a genre in which the most effective sound design and scores are often in dialogue with each other.

Although difficult to taxonomise, the sound of modern horror is increasingly seeping into films outside the genre. Bernholz cites the work of Hildur Guðnadóttir (Hedda, Joker) and Oliver Coates (Aftersun, Pillion) as composers who “exercise leanness and left turns really effectively, turning away from genre trends, and in turn forming new ones”. The most notable examples reflect the tension and terror of the world around us. Anna Meredith’s score for Eighth Grade (2018) is almost as stressful as the film itself, an overwhelming cacophony of electronic saturation that mirrors the intensity of the protagonist’s teenage brain. Eiko Ishibashi’s score for Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s eco-fable Evil Does Not Exist (2023) is extremely effective in its slow conjuring of terror. Musically unsettled, its elements struggle to co-exist, echoing the film’s themes of man’s threat to nature: sudden halts work as both a shock to the listener and a metaphor for finite natural resources.

In their joint cultivation of dread and thematic clarity, Ishibashi and Hamaguchi feel more like equal authors of Evil Does Not Exist – which actually originated from a project by Ishibashi – rather than a composer serving a filmmaker. This often feels like the case for film and TV that deals with terror of all kinds, and attracts auteurist musicians up to the challenge of reflecting it: Mica Levi is as much an author of Under the Skin as director Jonathan Glazer; Hildur Guðnadóttir’s compositions defined the creeping rot of Tár as much as Cate Blanchett or Todd Field. Perhaps this egalitarian spirit of authorship is why a great deal of the experimental composers attracted to this kind of project are not men.

Bernholz sees the marriage of horror and experimental music as a shared interest in psychological texture – uncovering the unexpected, strange and horrifying in the details of life, film and music. “Experimentalism can be so effective [in horror]: you can hear the ‘lived’ experience in those sounds, whether physical, physiological or emotional,” she says. “Moving away from recognised tonalities and familiar progressions and into something more forensically detailed is consequently otherworldly. It seems natural to me that those sounds work to trigger an unsettling effect on the listener.”