Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Stanley Kubrick made his own musical choices for his films, many of them existing pieces that were forever redefined by their use. (Remember "Thus Spake Zarathustra" in 2001: A Space Odyssey?) For his final work, Eyes Wide Shut, he employed composer Jocelyn Pook to compose some evocative string-filled music (including one track, "Masked Ball," eerily featuring backwards vocals), but his score also included works by Liszt and Shostakovich, syrupy versions of "When I Fall in Love," "If I Had You," and "Strangers in the Night," a jazzy rendition of "Blame It on My Youth" by Brad Mehldau, Chris Isaak's cross between John Lee Hooker and Roy Orbison on his 1995 song "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing," and, opening and closing the disc, a simple but intense solo piano piece by Gyogy Ligeti, whose work also had been used in 2001 and another Kubrick film, The Shining. The result was an eclectic soundtrack album that primarily was of interest to fans of the film who were in need of an aural souvenir.

Silent Hill Sounds Box is a collection of the Silent Hill game soundtracks.
Strings played at the bridge in streaking glissandi. Atonal clusters, filled in down to quarter-tones. Thundering piano chords. And what horror score is complete without the standard tool of surprise, the orchestra hit? These elements, in part derived from the early work of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, which was itself featured prominently by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining, have become staples of horror scoring. While some of these elements appear in Akira Yamaoka's scores for the Silent Hill series, he focuses more on slowly building and maintaining an unsettling atmosphere than on startling the audience, much like the games themselves. The music is not only atypical as game music, but also atypical as horror music, and while it manifests elements of various genres such as trip-hop, industrial, and hard rock from time to time…