Five Principles of Eerie Music

From a UX designer learning how to score Horror — through analysing what works and pulling out fundamental principles. TLDR: Don’t create beauty, create tension and unease. Use familiar sounds in unfamiliar ways. Surprise, discomfort, thrill, and shock the listener!

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

The blank project in Logic Pro X. The infinite possibilities with an abundance of instruments and effects. But no framework, and no idea about where to begin.

Like many of us, I want to create scary, eerie music that develops creeping tension for the listener. I decided to approach this like I would approach any UX design-problem: By studying what works and extracting the underlying principles.

Most people think that creating scary music is about jump scares and dissonant chords. It’s not. It’s about creating discomfort systematically — making the listener feel uneasy on purpose. I’ve found that this can be done using a set of principles that can be studied and applied.

The Five Eerie Principles

My research so far has uncovered five core principles that can help create truly eerie music. I’m going to try these out — and maybe you should as well. Let’s go and break conventions to create discomfort and tension for our listeners!

Principle One: Create Atmosphere over Melody

You’re used to creating beautiful music. Nice melodies that align with the harmonies that support them. You align everything nicely to The Grid. Four bars of this. Eight bars of that. Repeat, but develop. It’s all good and beautiful — and not scary at all!

Scary music is all about creating atmospheres and making people feel discomfort. Let the creepy atmospheres evolve, build tension and release. But always think in atmospheres. There’s a lot of interesting sound design lurking here.

Let the creepy atmospheres evolve, build tension and release — or don’t!

Listen to the 2024 Nosferatu soundtrack by Robin Carolan for a telling example. “Come to me” is slowly developing dread through deep, atmospheric textures, creepy-sounding human choirs — and then … shock! A heavy sting that will surely wake up the audience! This is the template for most of this soundtrack — evolving atmospheres, and barely a melody in sight.

Principle Two: Use Silence as an Instrument

Silence in music is a bit like white space in design. It is used in “normal” music, but for punctuation. You’d usually want to keep the listener engaged, to keep the groove going.

In horror music, silence is used actively, as an instrument. Sometimes, the most creepy passages of movies are dead still. Turning the soundtrack down acts as a great foundation for re-building the tension — or adding a sudden sting to support a jump scare.

A great example of this can be found in the track “Stranded” from “The Lighthouse”-soundtrack by Mark Korven. Brassy, distorted chords introduce a stark black ambience and pulse, but small passages of silence work to build up tension — and to create a foundation for this tension to become even stronger once the brassy sounds return.

Principle Three: Create Discomfort, not Beauty

Most of the time, people listen to music to relax, to feel good, or to get entertained. They listen to whatever suits their current mood, to dance, or to admire a beautiful composition.

In horror music, you do not want to create beauty — and if you do, it is only as a brief contrast to allow the horror to stand out even more. Horror music is all about creating discomfort. You break the rules and conventions of “normal” music to confuse the listener and make them feel uneasy without knowing exactly why. You lead the listener into the uncanny valley of music through “wrong” intervals, familiar instruments played in unfamiliar ways, sounds that feel almost recognisable, but aren’t. Play with the listener and scare them!

Lead the listener into the uncanny valley of music by using the familiar in unfamiliar ways.

Listen to “A Witch Stole Sam” from “The Witch”-soundtrack by Mark Korven (again!) The track starts slowly, gradually building tension. Eerie, high-pitched strings are introduced, then weird, ceremonial, human-like claps, but in an unfamiliar rhythm. Witch-like, truly scary, high-pitched singing in mass-like textures create even more discomfort. The voices build up, discomfort goes through the roof … and then the track ends in silence with no real release.

Principle Four: Use Pulse, not Rhythm

Almost all music has rhythm — even if it’s not always that obvious. Rhythmic music has a groove that keeps the listener going, and gets them to tap their feet or nod their head. Classical music has rhythm, even if it sometimes changes over a piece to support the emotional development.

In scary music, there’s rhythm — but it’s often disguised as a pulse. The effect here is much more primal. The pulse mimics a heart beat, and as such becomes highly relatable and human — for instance via a pulsating, deep foundation. You will typically ditch the grid, let the pulse shift, and remove the traditional concept of a recognisable, repeating tempo. Storytelling is king here, and the pulse follows the emotional arc of the piece, rather than a metronome.

Let the pulse follow the emotional arc of the story told, not the metronome.

Listen to the track “Salomonar” from Robin Carolan’s Nosferatu soundtrack. The pulse is there, but it shifts constantly through the piece. There’s a few percussive instruments, but they’re mainly used to support shock “stings”. The pulse itself is hinted via dark strings, complemented by eerie high pitched choirs and otherworldly sounds. Spooky and highly effective!

Principle Five: Build Tension, then Betray

Music in other genres use tension and release to a greater or lesser degree. Often this is what keeps a piece or a song interesting, and that keeps the listener engaged and interested. You build up tension to a certain degree — and then it feels great when it is released.

In horror music, tension is everything! You build up tension gradually, but strongly. You might not even release that tension, at least not often. Rather than a nice “homely” chord, a release here might just be silence — before tension increases once more. It’s all about keeping the listener on the edge of their seat. Giving them the thrill of the tension, and not knowing when it will release — or if it will refuse a release entirely.

Listen to “The Insidious Plane” by Joseph Bishara from “The Insidious”-soundtrack. The first three quarters of the song slowly build tension. Little bursts of eeriness reset back to the foundational tension level — before tension explodes in first one sharp sting, then a short reset, before an even sharper shock effect makes your heart jump.

How to use these principles

It has been an eye- (or ear-?) opener to me that removing many of the things that make music beautiful is what makes it terrifying!

These principles can be applied together or separately — and I find that they give me a structured way to get started. In a sense, it’s a framework rather than inspiration, and one that I can reference when I’m creating horror music.

Next for me is to try these principles out much more, to truly understand how they can be applied. Feel free to follow along in here — I will post more as I experiment and learn, and hopefully find interesting insights to share and discuss.