The iconic shower scene in Psycho was originally supposed to play out without music. Instead composer Bernard Herrmann created “The Murder”: as the killing transpires, violins shriek and scream along ...

DALLAS - Johann Sebastian Bach's organ music masterpiece "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" is one of, if not the most notorious spooky song. It has been utilized in several films to create that instant ...

Long before radio became mainstream entertainment, Edgar Allen Poe was already writing for the airwaves. Throughout the last decade of his life, his poetry and prose bristled with words and phrasing ...

I was recently watching a scene from the 2025 film Weapons for a monograph I’m writing and noticed a familiar sound: a low, unsettling drone as a character walks down a hallway. It’s the same kind of ...

What does “horror” sound like to you? Is it a creepy synth? Pummeling guitars? A maddening drone? Every year, the creative team behind Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights, the most fun, spooky ...

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Horror movies are a tennis match between the haunting absence of sound and ...

Halloween is just around the corner. That means it's time to start decorating and getting your home in order for the scariest season of all. And yes, that includes getting your smart home and Alexa ...

Researchers have shown that humans perceive approaching sounds differently than we perceive receding sounds. We overestimate how quickly the sound approaching us is moving (Neuhoff, 2001). There is ...