Suspenseful Music Quotes

For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.

Francois Truffaut's 'The Soft Skin' starts with a very mundane scene of a family and a man driving to the airport. Yet the music is like a thriller, and you don't understand why. It's not until later that you learn it's because the movie is a thriller.

I'm into horror pictures because I love the fear of being alone in the dark, and I'd recommend that to any composer who wants to work in this genre.

The movie that's had the most effect on me is Jaws. To this day when I'm in the ocean, I'm hearing that music.

Boy, there's nothing more thrilling than a chase. I'd often thought, over the years, that someone should do a whole film where it's nothing but a chase.

Watching Jaws just scared the living daylights out of me when I was young. I know a lot of people my age who are still petrified of sharks because of that film.

Some of my favorite scores include Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores.

Action scenes are not that different from other scenes.

When people think of a Hitchcock movie, it isn't just the visual, it's the sound.

I don't care how inventive you are; once you introduce strings into the ensemble for a horror film, you're entering into a world where a tradition has been thoroughly established. So it's repeated use over the years is like, 'Oh God, another film with strings, another spooky movie with strings.'

I love horror movie soundtracks like 'It Follows' or 'Halloween.'

Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts. It needs to generate a kneejerk reaction.

I always loved movies like 'King Kong' and 'Planet of the Apes,' monster movies, Ray Harryhausen films, all of that stuff. I always loved the music in them, too.

During 'Race 2,' I had to lean down completely because there was a lot of action scenes in it.

Like you don't watch 'Octopussy' or any Bond film for the story. You see it for the smart lines, the glamour, the overall package.

Scary movies depend on sound a lot to scare people. When I look around and see people are jumping in their seats, I think: Why? Why? Nothing happened!

And I think that I'd be a natural for scoring horror movies.

'Psycho' is probably the best known example of a horror film whose exclusive sound was strings, and since then, it's been hard to avoid that. The minute you have strings as your primary voice, the comparisons are always made.