Our Favorite Horror Scores

Plus! The Night Temple Halloween Party is This Friday!

The spookiest night of the year is almost here and The Night Temple is celebrating with our first-ever Halloween Party this Friday, October 31st in Los Feliz!

Join us for an evening filled with music, costumes, yummy food and eerie delight, where the spirits of our departed loved ones are honored and us mortals get to dance the night away. Your $25 ticket ($20 for Night Temple members) includes food and drinks, so you can dance, eat, drink, and be merry as we honor the dead and celebrate in true Night Temple fashion.

We’re excited to have our longtime friend and incredible DJ, Mr. Pharmacist (aka Gregg Foreman), an awesome musician known for his work with The Delta 72, Suicide and Cat Power, soundtracking the night with great music that we can dance to! And don’t forget your costume 'cos we’ll be hosting a Costume Contest with very special prizes!

Horror is a deeply loved genre for us. It tends to not only be exciting and fun but also reflect back to us some of the deepest vulnerabilities, questions, and traumas we share as humans. In that spirit, these are some of our favorite films and their scores, some straight up horror, others more surreal yet all masterpiece scores that we adore. We both love the following films with equal love, and have chosen to write each summery from one of our voices:

• Hereditary – Music by Colin Stetson: I love this score so much. It's terrifying, heartbreaking, otherworldly, and incredibly beautiful. It's got such an incredible, iconic theme. There's so much beautiful saxophone and strange vocals - instruments are used in unusual ways, music is recorded in the same rooms that the scenes occur in and a unique terrifying score is created. This score was one that gave us as composers, permission to experiment further and lean into creating new and strange sounds and new techniques. I have always loved this score but it wasn't until seeing Colin perform live that I fully understood the extent of his artistry - that he played saxophone by simultaneously playing notes, singing, finding harmonics, running arpeggios, creating percussion from his fingers, while circular breathing. These are sounds and textures that only Colin could make. Check out Colin playing live to have your mind blown. Also check out our interview with him from the Music in Visual Media conference earlier this year: https://youtu.be/EinnQmDCaR4 (Andrew) This score is so intimate that it's terrifying. Hearing Colin talk about it at an SCL panel changed my life because it gave me permission to experiment and use my voice in ways I had never thought possible before. (Carisa)

• Suspiria – Music by Goblin: A gorgeous, sinister, score from Italian progrock band Goblin. The iconic theme played on the celeste and glockenspiel, the tabla, the synth, drum and bass grooves, and of course those eerie vocals - "hhhhwwwwitch!". An incredible score that pulls you into Dario Argento's strange, dreamlike world of color, violence, ballet, and witches. (Andrew) It was hard to pick between this and Profundo Rosso's "Paura" score for some of the same reasons! (Carisa)

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Music by Wojciech Kilar: Few scores have meant more to me than this one by Wojciech Kilar. Its dark, heartbreaking beauty defined my adolescence and many spaces in my psyche ever since. The themes are bold, dark, gothic, romantic and thick with emotion, longing, and passion. Made only more raw and primal with appearances from incredible avant garde vocalist Diamanda Galás. The film ends with Annie Lennox's Lovesong for a Vampire, a song that complements this film with such profound and devastating beauty, it leaves the audience gasping for love. (Carisa) Such a magnificent score and film! (Andrew)

• Under the Skin – Music by Mica Levi: An editor for a few horror shows once mentioned to us that he couldn't stand this score because he couldn't get away from it. Everything was temped with Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score for over a decade. It was such a powerful statement and bold vision that its influence was over everything. Its sparse, minimal percussion, frantic atonal strings, dense clusters, extreme space, and atonal sliding themes, create a unique world of existential dread and nihilism for these strange, and sad characters (human and otherwise). An absolutely incredible score. (Andrew) This type of minimalistic extremity will inspire me forever. An absolutely stunning score. (Carisa)

• Fire Walk With Me – Music by Angelo Badalamenti:

How can anyone even talk about the score for Twin Peaks. This is music that changed the meaning of what a score could be, turning drama to horror and horror to heartbreak while transporting us beyond the realm of any known world into the surreal and the sublime. This was one of the first albums I owned and it made me want to be a composer. The depths it reached with haunting lullabies, with lyrics by David Lynch and sung by the beautiful Julee Cruise, profound melancholy, sexy jazz and dark, open frontiers of consciousness. This is some of the best music ever written for film and TV in my opinion and to this day, can transport me in a heartbeat to the beautiful, dark and haunting dream that still lives so alive in my psyche, a place called Twin Peaks. (Carisa) The themes, the jazz, the sinister drones, and the pink room. Amazing score. (Andrew)

• Mandy – Music by Jóhann Jóhannsson:

For Mandy, Jóhann Jóhannsson brought his beautiful, etherial, minimalist aesthetic, to make the heaviest metal score of all time. Both Carisa and I have had the one of a kind experience of hearing Sunn O))) perform live. Over 90 minutes they'll play the heaviest, loudest, slowest, most minimal doom metal you'll ever hear, leaving those left of us in the audience broken and borderline traumatised. For his elegant, beautiful, terrifying and heavy score to Mandy, Jóhann Jóhannsson brought in Sunn's Stephen O'malley to play guitars and help create the definitive metal score. There are some of the most of terrifying, heaviest drones you'll ever hear, alongside some of the most tender and emotional themes. The film is out of body psychedelic experience like no other, and the score is a masterpiece by a master gone too soon. (Andrew) Stunningly beautiful and transcendent film and score. (Carisa)

Watch these films if you haven't yet and join us this Friday:

💀 When: October 31st at 7PM

👻 Where: Los Feliz (We’ll send you the full address once you get your ticket)

🕸️Tickets: $25 (members $20), includes food and drinks!

Look forward to seeing you there!

EVENT LINK HERE