BEWARE OF DARKNESS
Runs With Darkness is my ode to synth-heavy horror music of the late 70s and early 80s (with a few modern twists and turns). While I watched plenty of cheesy, sleazy, gory and just plain weird horror movies on VHS in my teens, I didn't fully appreciate the music—probably because a lot of it wasn't very good. There were plenty of exceptions, of course.
John Carpenter is the most obvious of the bunch and, beyond his iconic score from Halloween, he composed plenty of weird and inspiring soundtracks for his own movies. Big Trouble In Little China was one of my personal favorites, even if it wasn’t a horror movie, but there was also Prince Of Darkness and his (mostly unintentional) collaboration with Ennio Morricone on The Thing.
Howard Shore’s music is now synonymous with The Lord of The Rings trilogy, but he’s been the main composer behind David Cronenberg’s films since the late 1970s; check out the Videodrome and Scanners soundtracks for his early, synth-forward work.
Ennio Morricone remains my biggest influence, no matter the genre, largely because he composed music for just about any species of film you can imagine. While his most well known scores were for Sergio Leone’s Westerns (especially The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly), he had plenty of horror films and bloody thrillers to his massive resume. The list is long and his work on a trio of Dario Argento films are worth hearing, but if you want some seriously freaky music from 1977, check out “Magic and Ecstasy” from the Exorcist II soundtrack.
Angelo Badalamenti snuck in a little later to the horror music game—especially when he’s most synonymous with David Lynch and the music for Twin Peaks—but did you know he composed the music for A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors? Yeah, me neither—I was a metal head when that came out, so all I cared about was the theme song by Dokken. Nevertheless, his synth-heavy music, in tandem with David Lynch’s own unsettling sound design work, left their mark.
I guess honorable mention should go the Italian prog-rock band Goblin and even Tangerine Dream. Goblin had a great run of funky weirdness in collaboration with director Dario Argento, especially the Suspira soundtrack. Tangerine Dream has many hundreds of albums and plenty of creepy, synth-heavy tracks to be found, but I suppose their soundtrack to Firestarter fits this particular thread.
Given the medium and the message, I couldn’t help myself but to put together a short promo reel that tried to capture the essence of some VHS horror. So I leave you with this:
