Goblin– Suspiria

An eerie, galloping prog lullaby, Goblin’s title theme from Dario Argento’s 1977 highly stylized, surreal tale of a German ballet school-cum-vaguely satanic temple/haunted house is often regarded as the prime slice of Italian horror movie music from one of the genre’s most prolific contributors (the band worked on many of Argento’s movies, and, most famously, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead). Goblin’s marriage of whispers, ambient sounds, slimy synthesizers, and some backseat guitar shredding lends Suspiria much of its tense, haunting atmosphere, and by some accounts, Argento had played the soundtrack during the film (at high volumes) to keep the cast properly unnerved.

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Fabio Frizzi– Main Theme from “Zombie”

Lucio Fulci’s 1979 quasi-sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, here about an American woman in search of her doctor-father and a British journalist travel to an island of the Antilles populated by zombies, whose existence has a tenuous, yet attractive relationship to the local practice of voodoo, features a great Fabio Frizzi thudding synth-junk-calypso theme which surfaces and resurfaces throughout the film to a point of mind-numbing ominousness, serving as a march tune for the flesh-eating inhabitants. The layering of synths and blossoming of the melody reflects perfectly the feeling of the movie: less of a shocker, and more of a hypnotizing, building dread. This movie houses not only a beautiful scene of a zombie mournfully sucking on gore in silence (save the hushed slurping), but a stuntman/underwater zombie slowly carrying on a battle-dance with a Real. Live. Shark.

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Ennio Morricone– Piume di Cristallo, from “L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo” (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage)

This is from one of Dario Argento’s earlier (1969) movies, more in the nuanced “giallo,” or thriller style (giallo, for yellow, the color of many of the similarly themed Italian paperbacks of time). Appropriately, the music is slightly less overt; a lilting melody overlaid with eerie wind chimes turns to a sort of rustic folk-noir with some beautiful vocal counterpoint. Interesting, in part because Morricone is so often associated with westerns when, in fact, he had a fair amount of experience with this kind of music/film.

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