Spooky Sounds

It's Halloween month, and so I'm trying to find spooky things to occupy my time. I watch as many horror films as I can and make playlists of creepy music.

Usually this is just  lot of John Carpenter. His score for the original Halloween is my favourite music ever, and the development of that score over the sequels is really interesting. But recently I've noticed that a lot of game and film soundtracks are starting to sound like Carpenter as well.

There's a real move, it seems, towards electronic, synth based scores. It was very noticeable in the film Drive, a few years ago, and then in the soundtracks to The Guest and It Follows. Sometimes warm and burbling, sometimes spiky, like shards of ice. A call back to the early synthesised horror soundtracks of the late 70s and early 80s.

You can find some great examples of it in the indie game Hotline Miami, where the music lurches queasily about in a quite unsettling way. I suppose indie games are going to tend towards minimalism, for the same reason those early horror films did - it's cheaper than an orchestra.

Synthesised reality

But it seems to be a real stylistic choice, at the moment. Dying Light - not a game I loved - had an amazing, eerie synth score which really evoked the zombie films of the VHS era. I didn't buy the game but I did buy the music, and I'll be playing it a lot this October.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iDYnAireiw


Stranger Things - the delightful retro surprise of the Summer - went for the same vibe: electronic arpeggios that sound at once sinister and sad. And then the other day I played Oxenfree, a wonderful and unnerving 2D Indie horror adventure, accompanied by one of the scariest and most beautiful game scores I've ever heard.

There's a theory that culture moves in 30 year cycles. A generation grows up with a certain set of influences during childhood, then recreates those styles once they are adults. So the composers, film makers and game makers of today are reaching out to the music that formed their experiences when they were young.

I hope it continues. Orchestral scores are all very well, but they seem too distancing for me. There's something very personal and intimate about a synth soundtrack that I love, and that seems a lot more appropriate to game play.

Or maybe it's just because I watched Halloween 2 in 1984, on a flickery, warbly VHS. Either way, it delights me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNEgCziVY0U