There are a handful of things that can turn a memorable horror movie into an iconic one: a thrilling and original conceit, a franchise-worthy serial killer, and jaw-dropping effects come to mind. But an all-important element of a successful horror movie is one that can't be gleaned from posters and casting reports, or even most trailers. The score of a horror movie, from a memorable theme, to an atmospheric enhancement of scenes, right down to the closing credits, can elevate a good film to a great one, with the best standing the test of time.

With that in mind, the Collider staff has put together 20 of the best horror movie soundtracks of all time. Composer names range from James Horner, Danny Elfman, and Philip Glass, to the one-word monikers of Goblin, Magnet, and Disasterpeace. While we've covered quite a few decades here, there's a good chance we missed your favorite horror movie score, but there's an even better chance that we've covered some you've never even heard of. You might even want to add a few to your Halloween party soundtrack! Check them all out below (in no particular order).

Related: The Greatest Movie Soundtracks of All Time

Hellraiser

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Image via New World Pictures

Composer: Christopher Young

Hellraiser is a peculiar, freakish viewing experience. Clive Barker's curious concoction is pure grimy lasciviousness. The Lament Configuration, a magical puzzle box, summons nightmarish, otherworldly sadomasochists to deliver the ultimate sexual experience for those who like it really, really rough. The sex, the pain, the pleasure, and the thrills are all mixed up in one lurid, phantasmagorical dance of death. That dark fantasy is strengthened by the sweeping score from Christopher Young, the composer who also delivered the haunting and horrifying tracks for The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister. The Hellraiser soundtrack invites you to join the kinky debaucher with a deceptively gentle, inviting hook that crescendos in alternately melodious and discordant tones; bells chiming as the Cenobite's dark, disturbing fantasy bleeds into reality. - Haleigh Foutch

Halloween (1978)

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Image via Universal

Composer: John Carpenter

When you think about Halloween movie soundtracks, the repetitive yet haunting melody of Carpenter’s original Halloween should be one of the first things that comes to mind. Most folks probably know Carpenter’s name as an accomplished writer and director, but perhaps less well known is the fact that he’s done a fair bit of musical work as well. Out of his 35 soundtrack credits, the Halloween theme is easily his most recognizable and often used, and it all started here. – Dave Trumbore

City of the Living Dead

Composer: Fabio Frizzi

As synthesizers became all the rage in horror scores, many became indistinguishable. But Italian zombie maestro Lucio Fulci’s composer of choice, Frizzi, used synthesizers sparingly. Taking cues from 70s exploitation and giallo films, Frizzi’s City of the Living Dead score mixes sexy guitars, choirs, and wood and brass instruments over the top of his haunting synth. City of the Living Dead is a big, full score; it flows like blood, and there is a very healthy plasticity in these veins. - Brian Formo

Suspiria

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Image via International Classics

Composer: Goblin

Is there a creepier horror movie soundtrack than the one for Suspiria, the 70s cult classic by Italian horror maestro Dario Argento? There are chants of "Witch!" and inconceivable whisperings scattered throughout this Goblin-composed score that paint the haunted red hallways of the occult ballet school (one that casually has a room full of barbed wires, might I add). The title track is a creepy classic, with atmospheric chimes that'll make you look over your shoulder with every step, but the Italian prog-rock band also dives into manic synths and percussions that call to mind ritualistic ceremonies. Even the delightful little piano number is the stuff of nightmares.

Argento had originally called in composer Giorgio Gaslini to do the score, but hated the cues, and asked Goblin to perform it in their style. Still hating it, Argento asked Goblin's Claudio Simonetti to write the score and record it in a day. The result? One of the greatest horror soundtracks, ever.  – Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

Candyman

Composer: Philip Glass

Candyman is not your standard slasher film. It's mature and languid; a slow-moving, poetic spookiness that blends romance, history and urban legend with erudite precision. As such, it was a fitting and ingenious move to recruit Philip Glass, one of the most revered and influential composers of the last century to score the film. Glass uses droning organs and chanting chorals that invoke a dreadful, hypnotic sense of ritual – fitting to the Bloody Mary-inspired myth of the Candyman. It's alternately unnerving and mesmerizing, always commanding, and occasionally downright elegant with an ever-present sense of despair. - Haleigh Foutch

The Exorcist

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Image via Warner Bros.

Composer: Lalo Schifrin, Mike Oldfield “Tubular Bells” (1973), Steve Boeddeker (2000 version)

The music of The Exorcist was likely overshadowed by the film’s mature content and pea soup-spewing effects at the time of its release, but the theme continues to be widely recognized today. Lalo Schifrin’s work on the score was originally rejected by director William Friedkin, partly due to studio pressure to tone the music down after it scared audiences a bit too much. The score ended up being composed of then-modern classical compositions, with the most famous being Oldfield’s 1973 piece “Tubular Bells” which was sampled for the theme. – Dave Trumbore

Daughters of Darkness

Composer: Francois de Roubaix

Released in the same year as Jesus Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, this Belgian lesbian vampire film is the complete opposite in storytelling and musical approach. Franco’s score is swingin’ fun lounge funk that accompanies a jazzy sex flick, with a very low emphasis on vampirism.  Harry Kümel’s film is also stylish, but it is extremely poised, sophisticated, and keeps a mystery throughout.  Daughters of Darkness is a truly undervalued horror film—with a gem of a score from de Roubaix, who passed away a few years later, at the ripe age of 36, just entering his prime as a composer.

The score to Daughters of Darkness expertly melds Old World Baroque with New World open sexuality. It transitions from harpsichord, strings, and harps to deep bass drums, wild sticks, and patient brass. It is skeptical of the old world, and embraces the sexy new one. With that sly, slow mix of seduction and hesitation, it’s no wonder one of Daughters themes was sampled by Lil Wayne. - Brian Formo

The Wicker Man (1973)

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Image via Rialto

Composer: Paul Giovanni, Magnet

On the off chance that you haven't seen The Wicker Man yet (for shame), I will be very vague. Much like the film itself, Paul Giovanni's The Wicker Man score doesn't announce itself as a horror. Indeed, if you were to take the jaunty shanties and lulling nursery rhymes without the accompanying narrative, you might never know it was a horror score at all. Which makes it all the scarier. When the lilting, cheerful tunes meet the eerie and eventually horrific narrative, the juxtaposition is a haunting discordance that lingers with you long after the film ends. Much like the inhabitants of The Wicker Man's remote island, Giovanni's score is deceptively simple and lackadaisical with a folksy glee that is jubilant in the face of your torment. You'll walk away from the film with a pit in your stomach and a merry tune scorched in your mind. - Haleigh Foutch

Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas

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Image via Buena Vista Pictures

Composer: Danny Elfman

Elfman’s four Oscar nominations may have come for his musical work on live-action pictures, but for my money his most entertaining achievement by far comes from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas. Sure, his themes for The Simpsons and Batman: The Animated Series might be more instantly recognizable, but how often do you find yourself singing them around the holidays? This entry in our list stands out as a soundtrack that you and the whole family can belt out in the car while delighting in the driving rhythm of “This Is Halloween”, the infectious repetition of “What’s This?” or the funky flow of “Oogie Boogie’s Song.” Henry Selick’s film may bring out the inherent darkness of Halloween, but Elfman’s score brings The Nightmare before Christmas to life. (Bonus Trivia: Elfman also provided Jack’s singing voice!) – Dave Trumbore

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

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Image via Universal Pictures

Composers: John Carpenter and Alan Howarth

Carpenter’s score for Halloween is the most famous and most oft-imitated horror film score. The fast but delicate piano score is the most likely to play on a loop at a costume party, or when you escort trick-or-treaters to various houses. It is iconic— and it perfectly accompanies the best film in the series—but for me, the best John Carpenter score of all time is in the third Halloween film, The Season of the Witch. Carpenter retooled the original 1978 score frequently, but this is the one that expands beyond the creepy lullaby piano theme. For Season of the Witch, Carpenter and Howarth surrounded the piano keys with very heavy synths, and the original theme music became much heavier and denser.

Carpenter and Howarth had co-scored two films together prior (Halloween II and Escape from New York), but Halloween III was the first time that they were able to compose the film while watching it together.  And this film would greatly influence their elaborate synth soundscape on their next horror collaboration, Prince of Darkness. - Brian Formo

The Shining

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Composers: Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind (with major use of Krzystof Penderecki’s previously existing compositions)

Stanley Kubrick often used many pieces of existing scores to great effect, including using Beethoven for 2001: A Spacey Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. When he discussed this with Positif, post-Lyndon, Kubrick said, “However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?”

The Shining was the first film that Kubrick commissioned a film score for since Dr. Strangelove in 1964. Carlos and Elkind’s score was used sparingly, as again Kubrick favored existing classical music (albeit, this time from someone who was very much alive, Penderecki, who has six of his pieces featured in the film, largely in the most climactic moments). However, Carlos and Elkind’s contribution should still be heralded. Their opening credits of sparse electronics (Carlos) and creepy vocal wails/exhales (Elkind) perfectly set the tone for the film. It is also the most indelible original piece created for a Kubrick film. And peppered throughout, it’s very effective.  - Brian Formo

Videodrome

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Composer: Howard Shore

David Cronenberg's techno-bent body horror, Videodrome, is all about the perverse fusing of man and machine and Howard Shore's score perfectly exemplifies that concept with a mixture of synth and strings that's so intertwined it can be hard to differentiate which is which. Despite the intese sexuality of the film, Shore's tracks aren't overtly sexual, but they do possess a twisted latent eroticism in their dronning, hypnotic swell of inhuman atmospheric sounds that pulse, breath and writhe, building to one climax only to taper off again. As regular, long-standing collaborators Shore and Cronenberg have a way of fusing their talents to create a single and singular cohesive experience that jars the mind and creeps under the skin. - Haleigh Foutch

Silent Hill

Image via Konami

Composers: Jeff Danna, Akira Yamaoka

Emmy-nominated Danna has worked as a composer on everything from The Boondock Saints, to Pixar’s upcoming film The Good Dinosaur; Yamaoka, meanwhile, has long been a composer on the Silent Hill video game series. The result of this dual approach to the Silent Hill soundtrack is one that’s every bit as atmospheric as the video games themselves while also possessing the sweeping movements and bold themes that bolster a big cinematic score. There’s quite a bit of environmental noise and sound effects that find their way into the score, at once tying the viewer more deeply into the visuals playing out on screen, while also making the soundtrack to your Halloween party even creepier. – Dave Trumbore

Slumber Party Massacre

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Image via New World Pictures

Composer: Ralph Jones

Cheap thrills.  Amy Jones’ film is an over the top portrayal of how slasher films treat women. These women are in constant states of undress, but the all-girls sleepover has an unwelcome party crasher: a man who murders with a power drill (read: his penis drives his massacring). Slumber Party Massacre is a goofy brother-sister take on the genre, as Amy is the writer-director and Ralph is the composer. And Ralph takes the cue from Amy’s easy slasher targets and ramps up the fuzz with a score that’s equal parts a carnival ride theme song (that’s incredibly distorted) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with bodies that are more than snatched). - Brian Formo

Psycho

Composer: Bernard Herrmann

Listen to Bernard Herrmann's famous Psycho score and try not to make fake stabbing motions. You can't—which speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the film's musical component. Psycho came before most of the iconic scary movie soundtracks we revere today, becoming the prototype for the go-to horror technique of using staccato strings (see, or rather hear, the Friday the 13th theme). Herrmann had composed many iconic scores (Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane, etc.), but the Psycho one is arguably his best, matching the heart palpitations of the audience members who would watch, seats gripped, “Mother” coming for the kill in that iconic shower scene. Alfred Hitchcock may be called the Master of Suspense, but Psycho's masterful suspense has much to do with its score, thanks to Herrmann. – Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

Wolfen

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Composer: James Horner

This is one of the late Horner’s earliest scores. And when you listen to it you’ll hear some sections that he repeated in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan the following year and Aliens five years later.

In the context of Wolfen, a socio-economic environmental horror film, it makes sense that he was playing with a few different types of music. There are multiple points of view in the film, and different types of scores to accompany them. There are two classical human points of views, one for an investigator, which gets the classical string, piano and tuba combo, and the other one is those in states of terror, which gets the revved up strings treatment. But most interestingly, Wolfen is one of the first films to use a night vision POV reference for the monster (here, shapeshifting wolves) and for that, Horner executes some lovely drum rumbles with low trombones and tubas. It’s a very evocative score and easy to see why Horner would want to replicate some sections of this in his larger studio films. - Brian Formo

Saw

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Composer: Charlie Clouser

You may not know Clouser’s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard his music. Having brought horror soundtracks into the modern era through a combination of classic, creepy tropes (an example is his Dead Silence theme which sounds like a children’s music box playing a variation on The Exorcist theme) and aggressively rhythmic synths, Clouser’s pulse-pounding scores are inseparable from the horror franchise, Saw. While not a great fit for the more subtle-minded horror films of yesteryear, Clouser’s adrenaline-fueled Saw theme is perfectly suited for the shock-and-awe format of the torture porn sub-genre. – Dave Trumbore

It Follows

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Image via RADiUS

Composer: Disasterpeace

The It Follows score comes from Rich Vreeland, aka Disasterpeace. He’s got a long list of video game credits to his name, but It Follows marks his feature debut and he absolutely nails it. Part of what makes It Follows such a standout is the retro vibe that comes from the production design, the slow camera movements, the way particular colors pop and, of course, that synth-heavy score. Vreeland is definitely pulling from John Carpenter and Hitchcock, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with paying homage to classics like Halloween and Psycho, especially when it’s so well suited to the content of It Follows. The theme song or “Title” track is the one I’ve been walking around humming ever since the film came out, but Vreeland also deserves a good deal of credit for bringing the whole score together using recurring elements like rumbling and catchy electronic beats, and his absolutely impeccable timing. – Perri Nemiroff

Resident Evil

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Image via Screen Gems

Composers: Marco Beltrami, Marilyn Manson

In the same vein as Clouser’s music but adding the celebrity star-power of Manson, the first Resident Evil score is one that definitely ups the tension. That’s not to say Oscar-nominated composer Beltrami wasn’t up to the task, but where Beltrami is an experienced industry professional with a huge list of credits, Manson brings an extra little something to the movie’s theme. It pervades the entire viewing experience, leaking its way into each scene like a slow but unstoppable fog. While the movie isn’t great, it’s made a whole lot more watchable by this catchy score. – Dave Trumbore

Scream

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Image via Miramax

Composer: Marco Beltrami

There are tons of highlights in Marco Beltrami’s Scream score, many of which persist throughout the franchise and contribute to pulling all four films together rather well. The build in “The Game Begins” is spot-on, kicking off with an eerie, playful vibe that eventually descends into some deeply menacing material. “Sidney’s Lament” is also a standout thanks to how much it contributes to the atmosphere of the film and then of course we’ve also got “We All Go a Little Mad,” which carries us through a good deal of the movie’s big finish. The whole piece is fantastic, but my personal favorite portion is what plays during the cop car sequence, when Sidney hides in the car and attempts to lock herself in. That whole scenario is terrifying enough, but there’s no doubt that Beltrami’s score intensifies the situation tenfold, and then we get those unforgettable stingers when Sidney turns back and Ghostface has vanished. There are so many bold, unique music cues that are perfectly timed to the action in the film that it’s impossible not to picture what goes down on screen even when you’re listening to the score by itself. – Perri Nemiroff