How whole­some songs become hor­ri­fy­ing through cinema

When we think of music in hor­ror there are plen­ty of touch­stones; stabs of strings, omi­nous­ly build­ing drones, sing-song voic­es and mani­a­cal laugh­ter. We think of ter­ri­fy­ing, influ­en­tial scores like Psy­cho or even mod­ern twists like Mid­som­mar with its sense of unease ampli­fied by its seem­ing­ly upbeat score. What’s hard­er to pre­dict are the pre-exist­ing musi­cal ele­ments that weren’t orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten for hor­ror, nev­er con­ceived to be scary, which nonethe­less become unnerv­ing cul­tur­al touch­stones. Per­haps this is because often once a song is well placed in a hor­ror film it trans­forms for­ev­er – the flip from harm­less to ter­ri­fy­ing can be as sim­ple as one good scene.

Chances are if you’ve been any­where near Tik­Tok in the last few years, you’ll be famil­iar with Tiny Tim. His cov­er of the 1929 hit ​‘Tip­toe Through The Tulips’ has become a go-to ​“creepy” song, sound­track­ing count­less posts on unsolved mys­ter­ies, unex­plained occur­rences, ghost-hunt­ing or even hor­ror make­up tuto­ri­als. Inter­est­ing­ly it was nev­er meant to be heard this way. The orig­i­nal 1929 ver­sion, made pop­u­lar by jazz croon­er Nick Lucas, sat atop the charts for ten weeks as noth­ing more than a charm­ing love song. When Tiny Tim cov­ered the song in 1968 on his ukulele, mim­ic­k­ing the sick­ly-sweet style of the 20s with his falset­to voice, he was admit­ted­ly seen as some­thing of a comedic nov­el­ty, but audi­ences found him charm­ing and endear­ing. How did the song switch from charm­ing to terrifying?

The clear moment of shift for ​‘Tip­toe Through The Tulips’ is its inclu­sion in a mem­o­rably chill­ing scene from 2010 super­nat­ur­al-hor­ror Insid­i­ous. With spir­its ter­ror­is­ing the pro­tag­o­nists, a record spin­ning relax­ing piano scratch­es and Tiny Tim’s spec­tral falset­to croon creeps in as a danc­ing demon appears. The song has since fea­tured in a high-spir­it­ed mur­der scene in Killing Eve, and bled into real-life hor­ror in a viral news sto­ry in 2019 in which a stranger hacked into a family’s Ring door­bell, play­ing the song and ter­ri­fy­ing their eight-year-old daugh­ter. This sto­ry seems to have been the spark that lit the Tik­Tok fire, and anoth­er of his songs ​‘Liv­ing In The Sun­light’ is also often used for creepy Tik­Toks despite its only pre­vi­ous major cul­tur­al use being in an episode of Sponge­Bob SquarePants.

Neil Lern­er, Pro­fes­sor of Music at David­son Col­lege, has long-stud­ied this kind of music use in hor­ror and even writ­ten a book Music in the Hor­ror Film: Lis­ten­ing to Fear. He says that in this con­text ​“I don’t think it’s any­thing spe­cif­ic to the music. It’s the recon­tex­tu­al­is­ing. And it’s usu­al­ly a sur­pris­ing recon­tex­tu­al­is­ing. A song might seem just total­ly ran­dom, non sequitur, or triv­ial. If they were singing hap­py birth­day to you [in Insid­i­ous] it would have been creepy”. The actu­al song choice itself is incon­se­quen­tial, but once it’s been used, it’s changed forever.

Though Insid­i­ous was par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful in the refram­ing of an old song, it’s cer­tain­ly not the only film to have done so. Retro music is a com­mon trope in mod­ern cin­e­ma; whether it’s a dusty gramo­phone whirring into life as a group of teens fool­ish­ly inves­ti­gate a creepy base­ment or an old hit crack­ling through the sta­t­ic of a car stereo, we’ve seen it a thou­sand times. There’s The Chordettes’ ​‘Mr Sand­man’ sound­track­ing Michael Myers’ Hal­loween II killing spree, the whole new mean­ing giv­en to Louis Armstrong’s ​‘Jeep­ers Creep­ers’ lyric ​“where’d you get those eyes” or the old love songs echo­ing round the halls of The Shining’s Over­look Hotel – songs which now are more like­ly to have you hid­ing behind the sofa than waltz­ing round the ballroom. 

These old songs work because they recall some­thing from the past; a once com­fort­ing mem­o­ry tak­ing on sin­is­ter mean­ing in a time and place it doesn’t belong. The Shin­ing is a pio­neer­ing exam­ple of the use of pre-exist­ing music in hor­ror with so many read­ings. The clear­est of these is the way the bloody his­to­ry of The Over­look bleeds out of the past, drag­ging era-spe­cif­ic music along with it, man­i­fest­ing itself once again in Jack Torrance’s increas­ing­ly tor­tured mind. Michael Myers mean­while, much like ​‘Mr Sand­man’, was thought to be safe­ly locked away in mem­o­ry and the ancient Jeep­ers Creep­ers beast ​“The Creep­er” awakes only every 23 years, bring­ing its theme song along with it.

More mod­ern songs can be just as chill­ing. It’s dif­fi­cult to lis­ten to Huey Lewis and the news with­out think­ing of Patrick Bate­man shuf­fling around in his rain­coat dis­sect­ing its influ­ence and his vic­tim. Tom Petty’s ​‘Amer­i­can Girl’ was once the per­fect road trip song but any­one who’s seen Silence of The Lambs would be brave to play it in their car. 

More recent­ly, Jor­dan Peele has proven a fan of sub­vert­ing once inno­cent songs – Us offers a strik­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion from the good times of The Beach Boys ​‘Good Vibra­tions’ against the extreme­ly bad times tak­ing place by the lake. Us also sub­verts its own uses of music. Luniz’s ​‘I Got 5 On It’ goes from a song play­ing dur­ing a sweet fam­i­ly bond­ing moment to some­thing more sin­is­ter through an eerie rework­ing lat­er in the film. In his lat­est film Nope, Peele iso­lates the com­e­dy lyrics of Sheb Whooley’s ​‘Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater’ – a nov­el­ty song about a galac­tic trav­el­er who wants to join a rock’n’roll band – and turns them into a chill­ing mono­logue deliv­ered by gruff-voiced cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Antlers Holst (played by the impec­ca­ble Michael Wincott).

The use of mod­ern songs in hor­ror often has quite the oppo­site effect of old­er songs; they seem ter­ri­fy­ing sim­ply because they are so com­mon­place. ​“What the schol­ars would call that,” Lern­er says, ​“is ​‘anem­pa­thy’. An anem­pa­thet­ic musi­cal cue would mean that the music is not match­ing what we think we’re see­ing on screen, it’s some­how cut­ting against the grain of that.” There’s noth­ing scari­er than scenes in hor­ror films that could eas­i­ly hap­pen to you. It’s often cheerier, non-threat­en­ing songs that work since that’s where you feel far­thest from gris­ly consequences. 

We’ve all been back to somebody’s house only for them to go on and on about the song on the stereo, but the thought that an excru­ci­at­ing rant about Huey Lewis could go from bor­ing to dead­ly is what makes Amer­i­can Psy­cho res­onate. There’s noth­ing bet­ter than dri­ving to your favourite song or danc­ing on your hol­i­day, but the idea that when your guard is down could be when you’re at your most vul­ner­a­ble is enough to make you dri­ve in silence. As for ​‘Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater’ – that shat­ter­ing of child­like inno­cence and safe­ty is a hor­ror tool as old as the genre itself, with count­less nurs­ery rhymes taint­ed for­ev­er by the creepy kids in hor­ror films.

Neil Lern­er points out an inter­est­ing study he did in lec­tures that speaks to this. Tak­ing the show­er scene from Psy­cho – fea­tur­ing one of the most icon­ic pieces of orig­i­nal hor­ror music ever from com­pos­er Bernard Her­rmann – he subbed out the audio for var­i­ous choic­es. One of which was Celine Dion’s ​‘My Heart Will Go On’, a hilar­i­ous­ly non-threat­en­ing choice. To his sur­prise ​“it was actu­al­ly the creepi­est ver­sion of it. It was real­ly hor­ri­ble. Stu­dents were extreme­ly dis­tressed about it”. Hav­ing dis­cussed it with them after, ​“they seem to think it was because with the screech­ing vio­lins, at least there was a sort of sep­a­ra­tion. It’s imag­i­na­tion. It’s night­mare, but it’s not real. But sud­den­ly, a song that at that time was on the radio in dai­ly life, sud­den­ly that brought it to close to home”. 

There are also things you can infer through pre-exist­ing music more sub­tly than you ever could through score or dia­logue. There are often under­ly­ing pol­i­tics to hor­ror, and Jor­dan Peele’s films are clear exam­ples of that. Us seems to speak to Trump’s Amer­i­ca at the time of release with ​‘Good Vibra­tions’ pos­si­bly a ref­er­ence to the good and easy times for those on top while the ​“Teth­ered” under­ground are forgotten. 

Whole essays have been writ­ten about ​‘I Got 5 On It’ and its spec­u­lat­ed mean­ing, the his­to­ry that lives with­in the song’s many sam­ples telling a sto­ry of appro­pri­a­tion and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Then there’s the selec­tive nature of the Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater towards its prey; in the song, he claims he won’t eat the singer because ​“you’re too tough”. When used by a direc­tor whose work is so imbued with ideas around race and class, it’s pos­si­ble to see this song’s inclu­sion as a wry nod towards Hollywood’s his­to­ry of exploita­tion and selectivity. 

More than per­haps any oth­er film genre, music can make or break a hor­ror movie. Effec­tive uses of songs in slash­ers stay with you, creep­ing into your brain late at night or com­ing flash­ing back dur­ing what was once a mun­dane activ­i­ty. While orig­i­nal scores are so often a huge part of what makes hor­ror so effec­tive, you can always escape a score – what you can’t escape though are the songs that don’t live sole­ly with­in the film. 

There are count­less exam­ples of songs that if you’ve seen cer­tain films will stop you in your tracks: Mike Oldfield’s ​‘Tubu­lar Bells’ in The Exor­cist; The Ever­ly Broth­ers’ ​‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ in A Night­mare On Elm Street; even ​“a bit of the old Lud­wig Van” in A Clock­work Orange, after which Beethoven will nev­er sound quite the same. Clev­er­ly placed music can make hor­ror crawl out of the screen and into real life. At least you can always be safe in the knowl­edge that the scenes these songs are for­ev­er tied to could nev­er hap­pen to you…right?