Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece of violent horror, has frightened audiences for generations, and even the most jaded moviegoers jump in their seats when Tony Perkins parts the shower curtain for a spasm of mayhem in the film’s most potent scene. The shock of poor Janet Leigh’s demise is heightened by Bernard Herrmann’s skittering, pizzicato violin-driven score, perhaps the most psychologically charged piece of music in film history, and certainly among the most widely imitated.

Says composer Philip Glass, “It’s a classic score, and it’s absolutely amazing. It made such an impression on people when the film first came out — and it’s still fresh and powerful today. You can’t think of the picture without the music: the images and the sounds are so tightly bound that they’ve become one, which is just what a successful score does.”

It seemed an unlikely match at the time: Stanley Kubrick, the highbrow director who had brought the works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Terry Southern, and Anthony Burgess to the screen, and Stephen King, the master of pop horror. King himself is on record as not having enjoyed the result, even going so far as to commission his own version of the film, but many movie critics agree that Kubrick’s 1980 rendering of King’s novel The Shining ranks among the best horror movies ever made.

Wendy Carlos (who contributed to the score of Kubrick’s 1971 masterpiece A Clockwork Orange) and Rachel Elkind added the moody incidental music that helps chart Jack Torrance’s descent from mild-mannered freelance writer to homicidal maniac, nudged along by the ghosts that surround him. (Note to trivia buffs: whenever Jack talks to a ghost, there’s a mirrored surface in the shot.)

Kubrick himself crafted a score that made liberal use of works by Béla Bartók, Hector Berlioz, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki. The score was recorded monoaurally, for Kubrick believed that viewers should hear the same sounds no matter where they sat in the theater. As a result, the DVD release confines the sound to the front channel, which may displease videophiles used to full surround sound. Never mind: just sit back and enjoy the nightmarish ride.

When The Exorcist appeared in 1973, it was widely hailed as one of the scariest movies of all time. (Its soundtrack, composed by British guitar whiz-kid Mike Oldfield and released as Tubular Bells, met with similar acclaim.) The movie’s 1977 sequel, starring Richard Burton, is, in critic Leonard Maltin’s words, “preposterous,” but it features a majestic symphonic score by none other than Ennio Morricone, the Italian master whose work enlivened almost a thousand movies over his long life.

“It’s an astonishing piece of music,” Harlan Ellison, the author of the cult classic A Boy and His Dog, among dozens of other books and screenplays, told me in a conversation not long before he passed away. “It sounds like Carmina Burana in spots, and Morricone does in fact have a background as a composer of liturgical music as well as soundtracks. His use of alternate sounds is remarkable. At one point you can hear a woman gasping underneath the music, perhaps in pleasure but more likely in pain. I play the album often, along with other Morricone horror soundtracks like Bluebeard and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.”

Jamie Lee Curtis’s 1978 debut, Halloween, has given viewers nightmares ever since, and no less for director John Carpenter’s chilling score than for his terrifying tale of a maniacal killer, the heavily franchised Michael Meyers, turned loose on an innocent small town. Carpenter announces the killer with a foghorn blast of synthesizer music that will set your heart to racing, but the tinkling piano that underlies the moments between slashings is no less unsettling.

Says Max Cannon, the author of the horror-tinged syndicated cartoon strip Red Meat, “It’s a very distinctive, simple soundtrack that sends chills up my spine every time I hear it. John Carpenter couldn’t get the sound right from some of the composers he tried, from what I’ve been told, so he just sat down at the piano and pecked it out. It’s really creepy.”

Horror-film buffs raised on a diet of maniacal slashers and exploding entrails may find it hard to fathom, but when it appeared in 1931, Dracula sent viewers fleeing down the aisles in terror. Tod Browning’s now-classic film may be less effective at scaring modern viewers than, say, Scream or Get Out, and its leisurely, stagy production lends it an antique feel. Still, it remains a benchmark of the horror genre, and no one has yet bested Dwight Frye in depicting mayhem and madness.

In 1999, Universal Pictures reissued Dracula with a new score by Philip Glass, performed by the Kronos Quartet. The composition is vintage Glass, full of signature elements like Psycho-worthy rapid arpeggios and reiterated themes, and it preserves the cavernous silences between spoken lines that are a source of much of the film’s atmospheric creepiness.

“I chose a very romantic idiom for the character of Dracula,” Glass told me in an interview on the occasion of the score’s release. “I kept away from the usual horror-movie effects. I was fascinated by Bela Lugosi’s performance, and I didn’t want to look at him as just another horror character. Instead, I wanted to look at him in a more human way, as a tragic figure. The string quartet helps to do that: the orchestration is very compact, very intimate and dramatic, and it has a nineteenth-century feel that evokes Bram Stoker’s original novel. I think Lugosi’s Dracula comes off as a more interesting character, though still quite frightening.”

Frightening he is, and Glass’s score does much to underscore the power of Browning’s eloquent film.

David Lynch’s score for his remarkably bizarre 1977 debut film Eraserhead is an accidental masterpiece of minimalist proto-electronica, a mixture of strange ambient effects, eerie blips and squeaks, and stray bits of organ music and feedback guitar. It would be a dissonant mess if it were any louder, but it’s pulled so far into the background that the sound doesn’t overwhelm the movie in the slightest—in fact, you often have to strain to hear it.

Says Donald Rubinstein, who composed the score for George Romero’s cult horror classic Martin and the themes for the television series Tales from the Darkside and Monsters, “I remember the Eraserhead score well, because the movie came out in the same year as Martin and was something I paid close attention to. It’s quite effective, and I think of it when I think of horror-movie music.”

“I see dead people,” whispers young Haley Joel Osment to a stunned Bruce Willis in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense, which brought a psychological intensity to the horror genre not seen since Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents, his take on Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw.

Check your pulse if you didn’t jump at the boy’s revelation, which comes backed by a subtle flourish of horns, bee-swarm strings, and rolling-thunder timpani. The goosebumpy score comes courtesy of former Elton John accompanist James Newton Howard, whose work has graced some 125 films since 1986 — but nowhere more effectively than here.

Humor and horror don’t often mix well, but they came together wonderfully in Tim Burton’s 1988 outing Beetlejuice, which propelled Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, and Geena Davis to stardom. The movie also brought a new generation of fans to the great singer Harry Belafonte, thanks to Danny Elfman’s rollicking, light-hearted score. Says Harlan Ellison, “Most recent movie music is very derivative, and terrible. No one walks out of the theater humming it. Danny Elfman’s work on Beetlejuice is an exception, and I like it a lot.”

Keaton, of course, has reprised his part in the recently released Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, whose ear worm is the Donna Summer disco version of the Jimmy Webb weeper “MacArthur Park.” If you haven’t seen it, consider yourself warned.

Edward D. Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is widely considered the single worst movie ever made—and, as such, it’s become a cult favorite, not least because Bela Lugosi died in the middle of filming it back in 1959, a mere inconvenience with a patented Wood solution. (See the wonderful film Ed Wood, with its remarkable performances by Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, and many others, for more.) The script is phenomenally awful, featuring lines like, “Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

Indeed. The dialogue may be painful, but the score is of interest as a species of proto-lounge-revival cheesiness. Composed by such Hollywood notables as Trevor Duncan (who wrote the sublime music for the 1962 sci-fi classic La Jetée as well as the not-so-classic Fire Maidens of Outer Space), Wladimir Selinsky (an accomplished symphonic violinist evidently down on his luck when Wood came calling), and Wood himself (as John O’Notes), it makes imaginative if occasional use of the recently invented theremin, an electronic gizmo that screeches out a tortured-cat sound reminiscent of a musical saw played on the dark side of Pluto.

It’s doubtful that people left the theater humming the Plan 9 score, either. Watch and listen, and you’ll never have to prove your courage in any other way.