What is the scariest/creepiest music you've heard?

With Haloween around the corner and the uncut version of Eyes Wide Shut on television this evening (gotta love Canadian TV) what is the creepiest or scariest music you've heard?

My pick goes to the piano notes in Stanley Kubrick's - Eyes Wide Shut. Particularly the single G note that plays over and over as Tom Cruise is handed an envelope through the mansion gate by that older man. It's amazing how music used in film and TV can stand your hairs on end.

As Count Floyd would say, "Ooooooh, kids, that's scary stuff."

 

Lots of early Pink Floyd has a slightly...'off' vibe about it. "Flaming," in particular...

-D

 

Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages- 'Til The Folowing Night. More creepy stuff from Joe Meek. I read in Mojo magazine when Screaming Lord Sutch died a few years ago he didn't have enough money to pay for a gravestone so they just put up a wooden cross.

 

I have the soundtrack to the movie Halloween and that one still can give you the chills.
My wife and kids refuse to ever be around when that theme is playing.

 

The Jaws theme gets me every time. The whole Aliens soundtrack...yeahhhh...that's been ripped off for about ten thousand movie previews.
Hang on i had to edit this....oops i did it again pretty damn scarry..but that could be me....

Back to real scary Coppala's Dracula theme......

 

The Exorcist is one of the main reasons I chose my vocation. Tubular Bells still gets to me. Bach's St Johns passion is real creepy. Parts of side two of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love subtitled The Ninth Wave are also very creepy. Oh yeah a litle song by Peter Gabriel called The Intruder.



I like creepy music

 

King Crimson - Larks' Tongues In Aspic

Very scary... yet so good...

 

Yeah, Flaming is sublimely beautiful and pastoral but there is a slightly menacing vibe to it isn't there. The 2nd half of Pow R Toc H spooks me every time. Syd's guitar work over Rick Wright's organ changes always conjurers up images of the aftermath of some unspeakable event.

Chris

 

The theme to Twin Peaks is pretty eerie.

 

For some reason Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor still strikes me as being kind of eerie even though it is one of my favorite pieces.

 

Scared my sister, once, with the first half of Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets. My favorite scary music is Danse Macabre. My music teacher in elementary school used to play this with a film strip that showed the skeletons getting up at night and dancing in the graveyard until the rooster crowed. Must've made an impression, as it is still one of my favorite pieces of classical music.

 

Anything by Barney the dinosaur pretty much chills my blood.

 

I nominate the music from The Silence Of The Lambs that is playing while the killer is doing his dance in front of the mirror in his basement. I don't think it's on the soundtrack, but boy, it makes that scene even scarier than it already is.

I am also terrified by the sounds made by the Grateful Dead in the middle of Dark Star on 10-31-91 at Oakland Coliseum, in the section right after Kesey finishes rapping. Even on tape this stuff makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Chris

 

RACHMANINOV-"Isle of the Dead, Op. 29" very effective.

 

Chris,

That song playing there is Q. Lazzarus's "Goodbye Horses," which oddly enough appears on a previous Jonathan Demme film soundtrack, Married To The Mob! Q. Lazzarus himself appears in the later Demme film Philadelphia. If I'm mistaken, Lazzarus looks like a cross-dresser in that one, making this all the more ironic...

The creepiest music I've heard is:

Alexander "Skip" Spence, Oar

Scott Walker, Tilt

The Moody Blues, "Nights in White Satin" (long version)

Pink Floyd, the middle part of "Sheep"with the Psalm parody

A lengthy piece called "The Seventh Seal" that we played in symphonic band in high school

 

Want some creepy, scary music?

I'll second some of the other choices:
"Main Title (Theme from Jaws)" by John Williams
"Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" (J.S. Bach) on the organ
The US single mix of "Tubular Bells (Now the Original Theme from The Exorcist)" by Mike Oldfield

Now a few of my own:
The musical theme from "Psycho" during the shower scene, with the screeching violins, seems obvious to me.

Two more that aren't as obvious:
"I Can Never Go Home Anymore" by the Shangri-Las ... Want something really scary? Make a loop where the singer screams "MAMA!" over and over. When those strings come in with that ominous riff right after the "Hush little baby don't you cry, Mama will go away," I get goose bumps every time I hear it.

Then there's the version of "Sympathy for the Devil" by, I think the guy's name is Jonathan Round. Some demented radio station in, I believe, Minneapolis-St. Paul plays this periodically, and I always seem to hear it in the dead of night as I'm driving through the deer-infested wilderness of west central Wisconsin. Mr. Round sounds like Satan Himself as he evilly laughs and chortles through it, with haunted house and thunderstorm effects going on in the background. It has to be heard to be believed.

 

Yeah, to whoever mentioned the music from Halloween, that's a good one. So utterly goddamned simple and repetitive, yet extremely effective. Then again, that's pretty much how the entire movie was, too. No special effects, just atmosphere!

Anyway, as far as my choices, I can't think of too many right now, but a few that spring to mind are:

* "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" (Live) - Pink Floyd
For some reason, the studio version doesn't sound as eerie as the live version from Ummagumma, but that's just me, I guess.

* "Fire on High" - Electric Light Orchestra
The first half of the song is pretty haunting, I think. Backwords messages, strings, weird sound effects, that repeating bell motif in the background, and of course, the song itself is in a minor key. I'd say, I guess, that everything up to the point where we're first introduced to the main acoustic guitar riff, it's pretty effectively haunting.

 

When I was a kid, "Dance With the devil" by Cozy Powell scared the hell out of me when I heard it late at night, when it was usually played on the local radio station.

 

I think this in interesting thread because perception of music is often changed when you tack it on to a movie or a TV show. I definitely get the chills when i hear these two following pieces, though before i saw them used in the respective movies/TV show I enjoyed them without that feeling.

First would be Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida used in the movie Manhunter. Scarrrrrry stuff and used perfectly. Of course the Simpson's also used that song to excellent effect, however not to the same scary factor.

The second would be Pati Smith's Land:Horses used in a chilling episode of the now defunct TV series of Millennium. Again just used perfectly and really driving music.

Both forever changed in my mind. Perhaps we could comment of that aspect of the scary music, for say songs we know or knew previously as just the song, but now because of seeing them used in a movie are scary?


And you could of course substitute the word "creepy" for "scary" anywhere in my post.

 

Night On A Bare Mountain
Dark Room (Paul McCartney)
Doctor Who theme

 

Q. Lazzarus update

Now I'm confused. I did some searching on Q. Lazzarus, and one website says Q. is a black woman from NYC who was a cab driver, while another calls Q. a he/she. I always thought the singer sounded like a guy, but now I'm not sure!

Now THIS is scary!

 

The theme from the original Twilight Zone tv show. Those 4 ominus notes do it for me.

 

Pink Floyd's live version of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" from Ummagumma...especially Roger Waters' screams!

 

Orff - Carmina Burana
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (by association with the Exorcist)
Pink Floyd - The Wall (well maybe black cloud inducing rather than creepy)
Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes(live) - one haunting traumatized voice

All the best - Andrew