Red Herrings and Musical Jump Scares

The genres of horror and thriller movies are a quite unique cosmos when it comes to filmic devices but also regarding their scoring approaches.

They are one of the very few situations where techniques and devices usually only found in contemporary composition are tolerated without any question by a general audience. The goal to create discomfort and set our body into a state of tension and adrenalin rush is desired and a big reason why fans of this genre enjoy it.

Interestingly, there is and has been a quite large market for low budget B movie gore and splatter films, so every media composer will likely have at least one of such projects in their portfolio, usually quite early on in their career.

In projects that go beyond the often seen "in your face" horror of such movies, maintaining the right level of suspense and horror can be a quite elaborate choreography between images, sound design and music.

Usually, the task is to keep up a level of adrenalin that gets fueled every now and then by shock, disgust and/or horror. 

A quite common device are so called jump scares. The prototypic jump scare happens from a silent and relatively calm situation where suddenly a loud sound usually combined with a sudden sequence of images. The only purpose of this device is to scare the audience and pump up the adrenaline again. Everybody will remember a scene from a random horror movie with a character scaredly sneaking through a dark basement and suddenly a monster/murderer/ghost etc appearing with a loud noise scaring the audience.

A related but slightly different device is a so called "Red Herring". This is a musical (and filmic) build-up to something that DOESN'T happen.

Imagine the same person from above sneaking through the basement, hearing a strange noise in one corner, scaredly walking towards it expecting something terrible. The music builds up suspense and plays along with the expection of the character and right at the moment when reaching that corner, the character notices that it was just a mouse and the buildup in the music ends in silence.

The psychological effect is rather similar to a jump scare, though not as intensely. 

These two devices often go hand in hand in such genres and have proven to work effectively.

However, just the fact that everybody can remember several scenes from different movies where they have been used proves that they are quite extreme clichés. The problem is, that there are hardly any "less clichéd" alternatives to achieve the same effect. Nothing works as effectively in pumping up the adrenalin level than being scared.

This is probably the reason why movies from this genre repeat the same general story line over and over again. There are uncountable versions of the same few story lines in this genre.

So, the narrow and clichéd paths that are quite common in the story lines also reflect back to the music. Besides the two devices mentioned above, there are countless more. For instance the lonely high sustaining violin note, the low rumbling bass drone, the reverby child singing a lullaby, a sparse solo piano piece moving in chromatic harmony etc.

They all however have proven to work very well in the genre of horror and thriller, so writing music for such a movie always is a fine line between working with the clichés and coming up with a new spin on things.

Regarding the two devices of Jump Scares and Red Herrings it is important to realize that their effect does wear off if used too often. We all remember movies where a constant repetition of jump scares became rather annoying similarly to the repeating red herring. Unfortunately, the decision and frequency of jump scares is often already embedded in the edit so even if you as the composer realize that they might be too frequent there is hardly anything you can do about it. Yet, in situations where you have more liberty to decide whether to add a jump scare or rather to play through, you should take careful consideration whether the effect is appropriate or iof it might note be saved for a later situation to not comprimise the impact of it.

And while I exclusively mentioned these devices in the context of the horror and thriller genre, they of course happen from time to time in other genres. Jump scares are even common in animated movies now and then. So the application of these devices are note exclusive to certain genres. However, the danger of overusing them is praticularly high when they happen not only once in a movie but several times.

It is also a good idea to discuss beforehand whether a jump scare or red herring should be handled by the music or the sound design and in cases where both are involved, how it should be coordinated. Distributing several of such situations between the sound and music department might help to keep the impact fresh for longer.