How ‘The Shining’ created a new genre of film scoring
Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining has long been regarded as a masterpiece of horror cinema, yet its unsettling atmosphere continues to captivate and disturb audiences. The film’s haunting quality, combined with Kubrick’s meticulous direction, creates an immersive experience that lingers long after the credits roll. The film’s musical score is integral to this eerie ambience, which contributes to the overall sense of dread and unease. In many ways, The Shining helped popularise ambient music, showcasing its power to enhance mood and atmosphere in film.
When considering the standard horror movie scores, it’s easy to return to the sounds heard in movies like Psycho. Thanks to the brilliant orchestral arrangements by Bernard Hermann, the Hitchcock classic is the kind of over-the-top music that most would expect from a jump scare, with that distinct musical sting that’s enough to make someone jump out of their skin.
Not so with The Shining. While the opening fanfare at the beginning of the film is pleasant enough, the biggest scares in the movie are normally accompanied by different noises scattered around the stereo image, building that same kind of dread that Wendy and Denny Torrance feel as they watch their husband and father spiral into madness.
Aside from how it works in the context of the film, listening to the pieces on their own practically puts you in the mindset of someone about to lose their mind. For all of the discordant noise, there was a lot of power behind these tracks, and The Caretaker would take that brand of ambient music to the next level.
Formed by James Leyland Kirby, most of the material the project created followed the lead of what The Shining had done, taking bits and pieces of sound and giving them emotion based on how unsettling they are. On projects like Selected Memories from a Haunted Ballroom, the music feels like what fans would have heard if Jack Torrance had never perished in the snow, still living amongst the ghosts of the past as the Caretaker of The Overlook.
Even though there are more than a few harsh moments spread throughout the piece, there are also bits of sophistication as well. The Overlook was always known as a posh establishment, so why not put a little bit of class right next to the most disturbing sounds known to man?
More than anything, The Shining reminded film composers that movies don’t always need a sweeping orchestra to make something scary. It might be good to add some drama to any particular piece, but sometimes, it just takes the right noise to put the listener on edge at the right moment.
Take one of The Shining’s many musical offspring, The Dark Knight. While Hans Zimmer’s booming score is what many fans remember from the 2008 superhero film, one of the most recognisable pieces from the movie is the theme for Heath Ledger’s Joker, which consists of hardly any music except for a strange tone that starts to get more and more unsettling as the piece keeps playing.
Even now, the horror genre has benefited from taking sounds that don’t always align with music theory. Just like The Shining marked a major turning point in how we look at horror, those unsettling scenes in the ballroom are still being felt today. No matter how hard people try to shake it, those ghosts of the past will be living in everyone’s head whenever those discordant noises start in a horror movie.
