The Italian Sound of Fear

Welcome to the late 20th-century Italian sound of fear! This playlist brings together music from some of the most spine-chilling soundtracks composed in Italy between the 60s and 80s for horror, thriller and esoteric films, as well as some of the eeriest Italian library music from those years – works strongly characterized by the presence of tribal, dark, and electronic elements.
Don’t listen with the lights off or you just might jump out of your skin!

The soundtracks of many Italian horror/thriller B-movies of the ’70s have a stripped-down but potently eerie sound where ominous synths, powerful drum breaks and tribal percussion combine together into a mixture of acoustic and electronic instruments that conveys urgency and authenticity. Composer Giuliano Sorgini excelled at it, especially in esoteric pieces like “Ombre minacciose” (from Salvatore Bugnatelli’s Diabolicamente Letizia, 1975) or “Telecinesi” (from Angelo Pannacciò’s Holocaust – Part II, 1978), and in the zombie-funk number “John Dalton Street” (from Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, 1974).

Different in style but equally suspenseful is Bruno Nicolai’s theme from Sergio Martino’s 1971 cult giallo film La coda dello scorpione (a favourite of Quentin Tarantino’s), where a 12-string guitar, an electric bass and a distorted guitar create a tense, chilling mood that is a perfect match for the morbidly hypnotic atmospheres of early 70s Italian thrillers.

On the other hand, horrors and thrillers made in the 60s by cult directors such as Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda mostly fall within the gothic sub-genre, with stories of romantic terror set in the 19th century.  Their soundtracks are characterized by orchestral ensembles where the strings’ sinister tremolos convey suspense and tension, as you can hear in Carlo Savina’s “Presagio”, for instance, or Fabio Fabor’s “Tutto Tremolo”, “Black Out” and “Day After”.

A horror vibe can be found in some of Piero Umiliani’s electronic library music: pieces like “Batticuore” or “Sinistro Carillon” (from the 1983 album Suspense elettronica) envelop you in a blaze of delayed synths, creating an electronic soundscape that is oneiric, mysterious and sophisticated. Perhaps a little more contemporary sounding is “Acquarius” by the Modern Sound Quartet (halfway between disco-funk and prog-fusion, it is reminiscent of Goblin’s scores for Dario Argento’s films), while minimalist tracks like Mario Nascimbene’s “Vento musicale”, Oscar Rocchi and Franco Godi’s “Oro sommerso” and Felice Fugazza’s “Nel buio” fall more within the sound-design category.