Chronicle staff’s scary music moments? ‘It’s a Small World’ makes the cut

Alida Valli gives water to Jessica Harper during a scene in “Suspiria.”Photo: Reporters Associati & Archivi / Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

Theme from “Suspiria”

Goblin

Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” is a fantastically beautiful, completely freaky film from 1977 that mashes up two of my favorite things: ballet and witchcraft. The decadent, demonic mood is helped in no small part by masterful accompaniment from the Italian band Goblin. (A new incarnation of the band, called Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin, will perform the music live at the Oakland Metro Operahouse on Friday, Nov. 9.)

Horror film soundtrack composer Claudio Simonetti and his band Goblin will live score their classic soundtrack to Dario Argento’s 1977 supernatural horror film “Suspiria.”Photo: Courtesy / Claudio Simonetti

The tinkling bells of the film’s theme always send shivers down my spine, and the raspy monster voice that sings along — “la la la,” like Mia Farrow on the “Rosemary’s Baby” soundtrack — is the stuff of long therapy discussions. When the song was played a few years ago during the final walk at the Rodarte fashion show I was covering in New York, I almost jumped out of my seat. I left with extremely unfashionable goosebumps on my arms.

— Tony Bravo


“It’s a Small World”

Robert Sherman

I first heard this song as a passenger on the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland. I was with with my husband, one 3-year-old son and one 3-month old son. At that moment, no one was crying, but the cheeriness of the singing that surrounded us was relentless. Did someone’s diaper need changing? Didn’t someone’s diaper always need changing? Was this going to be the peak cultural experience of young motherhood? What had I gotten myself into? There was no way out … and those chirping sopranos just went on singing and singing.

— Leah Garchik


“The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”

John Walter Bratton and Jimmy Kennedy

The web seems to have different versions of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” My mother must have known only a single verse of the darker version – in any case, it’s the one that still gives me chills:

If you go down in the woods today, you’d better not go alone

It’s lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home

For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain because

Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic

Disturbing as it was, it’s the first song I ever learned. How interesting to read that “the refrain echoed the theme from Robert Browne Hall’s 1895 ‘Death or Glory March.’ ”

Mom sang it more along the lines of Henry Hall’s treatment of 1932, with its spooky passages, rather than Bing Crosby’s upbeat 1950 take. My mother had a cruel streak, I sometimes think.

— Charles Desmarais


OHIO PLAYERS.Photo: Intersound

“Love Rollercoaster”

Ohio Players

For years this song creeped me out — to the extent that I’d practically leap on the radio to turn it off — because I believed what turned out to be an urban legend. About a minute and a half into the song, there’s a bloodcurdling scream, but way in the back, and the story was that that was the sound of a woman being stabbed to death. I didn’t believe that the woman was killed during the live recording, but rather that someone took a recording of a woman being killed and, in an act of profound perversity, incorporated it into the song. I believed this for over 20 years, until someone invented Google.

— Mick LaSalle


Richard Dreyfuss (left) and Robert Shaw lean off the back of their boat, holding ropes as they watch the giant shark emerge from the water in “Jaws.”Photo: Universal Pictures / 1975

“Jaws”

John Williams

只有两个音符:Da-dum。Da-dum。Da-dum Da-dum da-dum da-dum daaaaaaaa. Those notes, which may be E and F or F and F-sharp, are all it takes to inflict fear in the viewer of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”

That Oscar-winning music by John Williams denoted impending doom, and those of us who fear sharks want to close our eyes, jump out of our seats and run to the safety of the streets asthe shark makes its human prey mincemeat.

“You can’t really think about the movie without the music,’’ Jack Freeman, professor of film scoring at Berklee College of Music, told Boston.com in 2015. “It’s about as simple a theme as you can think of, but it’s primitive and it’s driving and it really captures the essence of the shark.”

Composer John Williams in 2004.Photo: Robert E. Klein / Associated Press 2004

When the movie came out in 1975, classical scores had fallen out of favor and pop tunes were in vogue for movies. But Freeman says in the 2015 article that Williams “went back to the golden age, really, of the ’30s and the ’40s with his approach. That helped to move Hollywood back to that approach, that big orchestral approach that they’d kind of gotten away from by the 1970s. It just justified again how effective that is and powerful that is when you have the full orchestra, and kind of brought it back full circle to where film music started.”

— Leba Hertz


“In Dreams”

Roy Orbison

当歌吓坏我,通常un-fun reason — i.e., because it plunges deep into the darkness of human sadness and anger and offers no way out: Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” Leadbelly’s rendition of “In the Pines.” But Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” gives me heebie-jeebies that are just as delectably vulgar as they are icky, as any good haunted house ought. If you’ve seen David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” you’ll forever associate the song with Dennis Hopper’s character’s tightly coiled mania and sexual sadism.

But “In Dreams,” despite Orbison’s intentions, unnerves on its own. Consider how many creepy tropes Orbison crams into his first lyric: “A candy-colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes to my room every night.” Unlike so many other pop songs, the music doesn’t feel repetitive. It keeps ratcheting up in intensity, until the only logical thing for Orbison to do is howl — in despair? in ecstasy? — when he gets to that final “only in dreams.”

— Lily Janiak


One Direction.Photo: RJ Shaughnessy / 2014

“What Makes You Beautiful”

One Direction

Nothing about this head-bobbing hit by boy band One Direction appears terrifying, but stripped of its generic pop rhythms, the lyrics speak for themselves: “You don’t know you’re beautiful”pause for an alluring flip of lead singer Harry Styles’ luscious locks“That’s what makes you beautiful.”

If the sound of the five boys doesn’t evoke the scene of a middle school dance, its lyrics deftly pinpoint the preadolescent insecurities of all teenagers, with subjects ranging from body image to the throes of timeless love. “What Makes You Beautiful” in particular is a prescription for winning the affection of a teenage heartthrob through means including, but not limited to, “flipping your hair” and “smiling at the ground, like nobody else.”

The innocuous chord progression paired with the aforementioned locks are bound to woo you (like the next teenage girl) into believing that in order to be loved, you must simply never realize your own merits.

If that’s not spooky, well, what is?

— Emma Heath


Martin Balsam as detective Milton Arbogast in “Psycho” (1960).Photo: Universal / 1960

“Psycho” soundtrack

Bernard Herrmann

One of the most frightening moments in “Psycho” is the instant when the screeching violins burst into our ears as Arbogast, the detective portrayed by Martin Balsam, reaches the top of the stairs in Norman Bates’ house. This brief scene has been written about again and again, but deserves another mention because, as an all-out musical assault on the viewer’s nerves, it never fails.Bernard Herrmann’s scorehas been studied and imitated by both filmmakers and musicians. But it’s not just the eruption on the soundtrack, it’s also the cutting and assembly of the images that make the scene brutally effective. Thanks to the internet, you can hear Alfred Hitchcock himself talking about the editing of “Psycho” and this scene. You can also check out Mel Brooks’ parody in “High Anxiety.” Or just watch this remarkable cinematic moment one more time. Try as you might to steel yourself, you’re never quite ready for it.

— Walter Addiego


Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960

Franz Schubert

The opening movement of Schubert’s last piano sonata begins as casually and benignly as you could imagine. There’s a suave little melody, not too fast and not too slow, that rides into view atop plush chords and a rocking bass line; it stretches up to a slight climax and then subsides. And that’s when everything turns scary.

Suddenly, without warning or explanation, a quiet, ominous trill bursts out at the very bottom of the keyboard. The notes are almost too low to even register harmonically — they’re more of a dark, rumbly swoosh, disappearing as quickly as they arrived. Then the main melody picks up exactly where it left off, as if nothing had happened.

There are several confluent reasons why this passage is so haunting. For one thing, the disruption is so subtle and so brief that you can almost persuade yourself it didn’t happen. It’s like the moment in the horror movie when the protagonist gets a quick glimpse of the psycho killer in the mirror, only to have the image vanish instantly. Then there’s the contrast between the clarity of the main melody and the obscurity of the trill, like a splotch of dark paint flicked onto a sunny landscape.

但是最可怕的一部分中断是这样的:It makes no sense. One of Schubert’s favorite tricks is to introduce an apparent anomaly into a piece of music that he then, painstakingly and at length, justifies through musical logic. But you can listen to the entire first movement of the piece and be no wiser about what that trill means. It’s justthere, an emblem of the chaos and terror that can well up without warning or explanation in any human life.

— Joshua Kosman


Metallica’s James Hetfield (left) and Kirk Hammett in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 6.Photo: Jack Plunkett / Invision

“One”

Metallica

A lot of people consider Metallica’s “One” to be one of the most terrifying songs of all time. There are plenty of obvious reasons for this.

The Bay Area heavy metal band’s Top 40 charting single from 1989 is written from the perspective of a quadriplegic soldier who wants to die. It is built around an ominous chugga-chugga-chugga riff that extends over eight minutes. And itsnoirish music video, which splices performance footage with scenes from the antiwar movie “Johnny Got His Gun,” played out like a mini-horror flick on heavy rotation on MTV (and this was before the hair plugs!).

But I have more personal reasons for being scared of the track, and of Metallica in general. In the era of cassette tapes, one of my friends asked to borrow my copy of “… And Justice For All,” the album from which the song came, and when he returned it he said that he heard strange voices on it.

So I put it in the boombox and hit play.

This was before I realized you could override the copy protection function on cassettes with a piece of Scotch tape. As the tape started to roll and the song’s soft melodic intro cued up, suddenly a demonic voice — which, in retrospect, sounded like Cookie Monster — broke through and growled, “Get out!”

So I did. Out of the room. Out of the house. Practically out of the ZIP code. I have had a very fraught relationship with “One” and Metallica ever since.

— Aidin Vaziri

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