Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear

Chapter 2 Mischief Afoot Supernatural Horror-comedies and the Diabolus in Musica Janet K. Halfyard In terms of genre, the devilish and the supernatural find their usual home in horror films—but horror, like most genres, also has its comic equivalents, films that locate themselves in the same generic area but instead play the horror for humor more than terror.1 Both horror and comedy, after all, draw attention to taboo topics, things that disturb us to the point of screaming or laughing. Music has a well-established role in interpreting the image for the audience in mainstream cinema, so we can logically assume that music will form part of the mechanism by which this transformation from the horrifying to the comic is also achieved. This chapter examines the strategies used in a range of supernatural horror- comedies and how the music manages to simultaneously locate the film within—or at least close to—the horror genre, while at the same time encouraging the audience to laugh instead of scream. Capturing the overall tone of a film is often an important part of how a composer develops a scoring strategy: this tone—the overall character and identity of the film—may be achieved through the manipulation of musical elements including melody, tonality, tempo, rhythm, instrumenta- tion, musical texture, and potentially any other aspect of the composition. Horror, for example, has particular musical gestures—the stinger to scare us, drones and sustained tremolandi strings to create suspense—that composers have long used to create the kinds of emotional responses required by the genre. Orchestral scores predominate, and with them come uses of some otherwise unusual instruments: harpsichords and church organs probably appear more in horror films than in any other genre, and the cultural association of the sound of these instruments with gothic horror has been discussed.2 Other strategies for classic horror scoring focus on the use of atonal and dissonant harmonies. Neumeyer and Buhler examine the way that pitch relations work within film scores and observe that, although something of a generalization, we tend to read major keys as more optimistic. We read these more stable modes—minor keys possess a greater potential for chromaticism and thus for dissonance than do major keys—as expressive of positive emotions: “What is crucial 22 Janet K. Halfyard in the major/minor distinction is affect, not scale form or the diatonic/ chromatic dichotomy. In other words, major/minor is another aspect of [our] ‘cultural musical codes’ (Gorbman 1987: 3), a coded binary pair.”3 This allows major/minor keys and consonance/dissonance to represent different characters and ideas as mutual opposites along dichotomies of good and bad or positive and negative. Atonality, however, effectively operates “outside the system,” thereby leading to more specific ways of reading it in cinematic contexts: It is surely not a coincidence that atonality makes its deepest inroads in suspense, horror and science fiction films . [where] subjective crisis and psychological rupture are often prominent themes, with the character experiencing a debilitating loss of centre, which is figured musically by the absence of a tonal centre.4 Similarly, in horror films, the monsters are “Others” who are themselves outside the (human) system, so here we tend to find the humans represented by tonality, and the monsters by atonality, as, for example, in James Bernard’s score for Dracula (known as Horror of Dracula in the United States) (1958), with its stridently atonal main title for Dracula himself.5 By using atonal music, the destabilizing threat that the character represents gets coded in audible terms, even when the audience is unable to decode it or is not consciously aware that it is happening. It is these uses of dissonance and atonality, coupled with the stingers of fright, and the sustained musical gestures and silences of suspense that collude to scare the audience. One of the specific challenges facing a composer writing for a film that blends comedy and horror arises from the potentially conflicting tones implied by these two genres. How does one write music that will simultaneously allude to both fear and humor? In conjuring up the idea of the devil, the devilish, and the supernatural in otherwise comic films, the most obvious connection to standard horror scoring is that using a full orchestral score is the most prevalent strategy, but after that the strategies diverge somewhat: this music, after all, wants to allude to fear without necessarily inspiring fear itself. Composers working in this genre have a pronounced tendency to use two specific strategies that are related if different to those of true horror, but that nonetheless tap into some longstanding cultural musical associations. One of these is an allusive strategy, namely, the use of specific devices that allude to the horrific and the devil: the organ does still appear in specifically ironic musical gestures, but the more important instrument is the violin; and there are also instances of composers making specific intertextual allusions to other music in order to draw in ideas of horror, the devil, and the supernatural. Second, we find a pitch-based strategy, in particular, the use of the tritone, a highly Mischief Afoot 23 dissonant interval within the Western musical system and one of the few that has a profusion of names (tritone, augmented fourth, diminished fifth), stemming in part from the fact that it does not fit neatly in the normal system. Apart from the fact that both the strategies have the potential to parody classic horror, both also overtly reference mythologies associated with the devil, and so they use a subtly but importantly different set of associations to those of classic horror scores. Since the devil stopped playing the bagpipes around the end of the medieval period, the violin has been his preferred instrument of choice, as heard most famously in Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre (1874) and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918). Both those pieces draw on the folklore of the devil as a fiddler who plays at a gathering of witches in the former, and who tricks a man out of his soul in the latter. While the violin of course sits as a mainstay of most orchestral music, its use in supernatural horror-comedy scoring alludes more particularly to folk music, and indeed to Saint-Saëns and Stravinsky. Danse Macabre also introduces the second, pitch-based strategy: it requires the use of scordatura, the technique of retuning one of the violin strings. In this case the E string is retuned to an E flat, thereby creating a tritone with the adjacent open A string. The tritone’s position within the medieval study of music caused it to acquire an interestingly specific musical symbolism. Its numerological characteristics oppose all that is defined as good in Western theology and music: six is the number of the devil, while seven is the perfect number, the divine number. The demonic tritone falls on the sixth semitone above (and below) the tonic as opposed to the perfect fifth, which falls on the seventh semitone. The tritone is the sixth step on the circle of fifths away from the tonic; it is, harmonically speaking, as far from grace as one can fall, associations that led to it being christened the diabolus in musica, the devil in music, and that have always made it exceptionally useful to composers who wish to convey the idea of evil, the Other, or the alien. One might therefore argue that this use of the interval to represent evil is nothing new and certainly nothing unique to the supernatural horror-comedy, but there are specific differences in the way that tritones are used here compared to other genres. Philip Tagg, for example, has examined the use of the tritone in relation to crime in thrillers and film noir, arriving at a very specific model for this scoring involving prominent use of tritones in association with minor keys, jazz influences, and chromaticism.6 Scott Murphy, meanwhile, examines the use of the tritone in science fiction films, where he observes that a particular musical gesture, a chord progression consisting of two major key chords separated by a tritone, has come to be correlated with the presentation of images and ideas of outer space.7 In non-comic horror, by contrast, the prevalent use of either discordant or entirely atonal music can render 24 Janet K. Halfyard the tritone redundant as an interval specifically signifying disrupture or the supernatural in the context of so many other intervals and chords equally disruptive of tonal harmony. In supernatural horror-comedy the scoring is again specific in the way it tends to bring out the tritone itself as an important interval, very much as Saint-Saëns did, and for the same reasons. The Devil has the Best Tunes: The Tritone in Supernatural Horror-comedy Scoring The composer most associated with comic horror films is Danny Elfman, largely because of his work with Tim Burton, a director who often brings a comic twist to macabre subject matter and with whom Elfman has worked on several films that have some relationship to the horror genre, most notably Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and The Corpse Bride (2005). Most of these films are more idiosyncratic than strictly comic, and similarly they allude to, rather than actually are, horror—characters, sets, and narratives all borrow ideas from the horror genre (ghosts, living skeletons, lonely mansions, misty graveyards, a betrayed woman returning from the dead to seek justice for her murder, etc.) without ever really trying to scare the audience—and the characters who most clearly derive from horror (Edward, Jack Skellington, the Corpse Bride) are also the ones with whom we are asked to empathize.8 Beetlejuice, the earliest of these, is the only one of these that sits unequivocally in the non-animated horror-comedy sphere.

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