How to Write Horror Music Without Pooping Yourself - Part 2

In this post, Espen continues to work on his ‘How to Write Horror Music’ series.

This time, he is moving into Act 2, where it really starts to build and grow.

How I build Act 2 in a horror cue

The video above is Espen’s. Here’s how I go about the same thing in my own music.

Act 1 sets the scene. In a horror cue that can be a single note or a breath with loads of reverb. Act 2 is all about pace and build. Think of it as the moment the family has moved into the haunted house and seen their first ghost. Something is starting to happen.

The first job is to bring in an element of pace. It doesn’t have to be drums. It could be a ticking clock, sticks, a rhythm, or a pizzicato string pattern. A ticking clock still surprises me with how well it works. It gives you urgency without pushing up the tempo. Keep the ticks feeling like a real clock, around 60 or 30 BPM, because 120 starts to sound odd. You can layer a bigger, clunkier clock ticking less often under a cleaner one ticking every second, a bit like the hands of a clock. Put it in reverb or a delay and it becomes the creepy clock in the other room.

Then increase the scale and tension with more layers, risers, clustered chord voicings and doubled rhythms. Risers are useful because a drone tells you something bad is going on, but a rising pitch tells you something bad is about to happen. It gives the tension an end point. I like small movements, somewhere between the root and the fifth. Once you get up to an octave it starts to sound like someone being beamed into space.

You can treat Act 2 as two halves, a smaller build and then a more powerful one. Think of each act as its own little track with a start, a middle and an end, then stop down into the next act. A stop down doesn’t have to be silence. Rises and effects can carry through it. Before the stop, try copying the last bar and letting the tension run for one more bar. It makes the drop hit harder.

For more on this, 5 Things That Make Great Horror Music looks beyond the scary sounds, How I Wrote The ‘In The Earth’ Trailer Music walks through a tense placed track, and My Process for Composing Horror Music for an Abandoned Asylum follows a horror track from scratch. My Horror Music Mastery course covers tension, structure and atmosphere in depth.

Happy composing!Rich