“A few well-chosen string chords or a snippet of vocalizing reverberate through the movie theater, and suddenly you’re suffused with dread,” writes Joshua Kosman in Sunday’s (10/25) San Francisco Chronicle. “The music tells you to be terrified…. ‘Fear is an absolutely primal emotion,’ says composer and neuroscientist Joel Douek…. ‘Low sounds are typically an important part of fear, because they correspond to something large … that can be threatening to us.’ … The famous musical motif from ‘Jaws’ … achieves its effect in part because [John] Williams sets it deep in the low strings.… Conversely, high-pitched sounds like the jabbing strings in [Bernard] Herrmann’s classic score for ‘Psycho’ hijack our innate tendency to react to the cries of a human or animal in distress…. Greg Pliska, a New York film and theater composer … points to Kubrick’s use in ‘The Shining’ of excerpts from the late Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s work ‘Utrenja,’ which includes spectral whispering by a choir. ‘Once you have people whispering,’ Pliska says, ‘that’s scary right off the bat.’ … Opera director Elkhanah Pulitzer points out that Wagner’s ‘Flying Dutchman’ uses similar methods…. ‘It’s not scary in a horror-movie way, but it does create a primal effect.’ ”
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