Posted by: Carolyn Bobo
Zombies are trendy this fall. In fact, the ghouls were seen on campus on Oct. 23, just in time for Halloween. Two other staples of the festival, spooky music and scary movies, are back, too. 
“There’s a primal desire for many people to be scared and thrilled in a safe zone. You want to be shaken and stirred,” says Harry Benshoff, left, associate professor of radio, television and film.
He says that Hollywood continues to make and remake horror movies and produce countless sequels, partly because of economics.The movies are “cheap and easy to make and have a built-in audience."
“They skew toward younger people. Then five or 10 years go by, and studios can remake the same movie, or release another sequel, for a new generation of teenagers,” says Benshoff, who says the appeal of horror movies “is like the appeal of a roller coaster.” 
Andrew M. May, right, associate professor of music, says spooky music is caused by extremes of high or low register, dissonant or unusual harmonies, particularly those that slide chromatically between keys or abruptly out of key. Unfamiliar timbres and sudden contrasts, such as a quiet, tense harmony broken by an explosion of sound, also seem scary.
May directs the Center for Experimental Music and Media at the College of Music. He composes chamber music in which some of the performers are invisible computer systems, which May sometimes calls playing with ghosts.
May considers the organ to be the eeriest of traditional instruments. He describes organ sounds - the staple of classic silent horror movies such as 1925's original Phantom of the Opera - as “coming from all around the space” around the performer. “We hear a colossal sound, magically disembodied and magnified from the human who controls it,” he says.
A prime example is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor, prominently featured in Phantom of the Opera. Find a YouTube video of German organist Karl Richter performing Bach’s classic.
See Extended Entry to learn more about scary music and movies.
In addition, music patterns that repeat for a long period of time, such as the famous shark theme of two alternating notes in John Williams' score to Jaws, create suspense and tension, May says. He observes that a classic case of several of these techniques working together is the repeated high-pitched screech of the violins in Bernard Herrman's Psycho theme. May says that its sudden entrance "never fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck." 
Benshoff notes that the roots of American horror films come from gothic literature, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as carnival freak shows. Left, Boris Karloff in the 1931 classic film. Horror films' themes also tend to be connected to current issues in American society, he says, giving the torture films like Saw and its many sequels as examples.
"These films are connected to 9/11 and its aftermath. Here in America, we don't want a serious debate about torture, but we have a subgenre of horror movies that explore those fears about torture," he says. "Likewise, the slasher movies of the 1980s seemed to be connected to the AIDS crisis. The message seemed to be 'Have sex and you'll be killed in a terrible way."
In the last 10 years, Benshoff says, yet another type of horror movie has surfaced — remakes of Asian horror films such as 2002's The Ring, which was Ringu in Japan. Benshoff says interest in Asian horror films in America sprang from interest in Japanese anime.
"These films tend to be true to Asian culture. The ghost with long black hair goes back for centuries," he says. "The films also often have a lot of striking visual qualities, which are fairly new in Hollywood horror films and appeal to audiences."
(Interviews by Nancy Kolsti, University Relations, Communications and Marketing)
1:01 PM
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