Béla Bartók used traditional folk and peasants' music in his work, but kept the primitiveness intact. This leads to many haunting moments.
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, famously used in Kubrick's The Shining.
Concerto For Orchestra's first four sections all have disturbing and haunting moments, comparable to a dark night in nature.
Luciano Berio's Sequenza series. A list of serialist pieces which wouldn't sound out-of-place if the Silent Hill games made greater use of music. It even makes the sound of an accordion seem unnerving. The worst? "Sequenza II" for female voice. That muttering...
Certain parts of Symphonie fantastique, particularly the last two movements. Especially if you know what they're about.note Respectively, a condemned man being marched to the scaffold, and a witches' dance.
The "Dies Irae," a part of the Requiem mass taken from a 13th-century hymn. It describes the Last Judgment. Surprised that it's scary/creepy? Berlioz did manage to change the way the tune was used, however, when he quoted it in his aforementioned symphony, and it's been parodied ever since (as in the Saint-Saens piece described above).
The final frantic ride to hell in La damnation de Faust is appropriately terrifying — the music evokes the gallop of demonic horses, the shrieking of hideous birds, dancing skeletons and a rain of blood. Both the chorus and the singer playing Faust are required to just straight up scream at different points, which is deeply freaky and not something you usually hear in Romantic music. The following triumphant demonic chorus (sung mostly in an invented satanic gibberish) is a cross between this and Awesome Music.
Daniel Bukvich's Symphony #1 (In Memoriam Dresden), written in remembrance of the Allied bombing of Dresden during WWII. Creepiness incarnate at the beginning... and then screaming flutes, weird wavy timpani, and then a movement where the band starts whispering... then talking... then shouting, and then screaming as if they're being burned alive. Which, coincidentally, is what the last movement is supposed to be about.
George Crumb's "Black Angels" will make you feel like insects are crawling up your skin.
Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" has a very eerie atmosphere. Thanks to Disney's Fantasia the music actually became more unnerving.
Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King," from Peer Gynt Suite, is pretty creepy even if you haven't seen the movie version of Stephen King's Needful Things.
Gustav Holst's "The Planets": The vastness of space can be intimidating in itself, but the sections "Mars, Bringer Of War", "Saturn, Bringer Of Old Age" and "Uranus, The Magician" all have a spooky feel to them.
"Neptune, the Mystic" is the one which many people consider to be the most haunting. The whole piece sounds very eerie and unsettling throughout, giving off very strong feelings of Nothing Is Scarier; very likely intentional given that Neptune, being the furthest planet out in the Solar System, effectively serves as the gateway to the vast, uncharted territory of deep space. Towards the end, an unnerving chorus of wailing voices starts up, and as the piece ends these wailing voices gradually fade out...
Neptune is the Roman god of the sea. The sea also happens to be both extremely vast and mostly uncharted. On that logic the piece could be trying to evoke the unsettling, mysterious nature of the deep ocean.
Jacques Ibert's "Pièce pour flute seule" sounds so mysterious that it actually becomes frightening.
Mediaeval Baebes' "How Death Comes." A sort of spoken, sort of sung description of the process of death. Goes from scary whispering to shockingly loud.
Pictures at an Exhibition has a few haunting moments: "The Gnome", "Chickens In Their Eggs" and "The Hut On Fowl's Legs/Baba Yaga". If you hear the scary music that Mussorgsky wrote for these passages you're actually glad that the original paintings that inspired him are lost.
Utrenja seems to exist solely to make people scream. The chanting from the chorus is unnerving, and the rhythmic knocking sound sounds like a pair of skulls being smashed together. And then come the ear-splitting clanging and sirens.
Most of his symphonic pieces; there's a reason that several of them were used as the soundtrack to The Shining. Let's not even think about what it says about Adrian Veidt that he apparently listens to them for fun. Here are acouple of links.
Peter and the Wolf. The music accompanying the cat trying to catch the little bird has a literal Jump Scare moment when the cat misses him.
The threatening horns when the wolf leaves the forest.
The music when the cat notices the wolf and quickly climbs the tree. Scary enough, but then the wolf chases the duck and devours the poor creature, all accompanied by nervous music that makes little children's imagination go berserk.
The spooky flute representing the bird and the equally haunting bassoon representing the granddad slowly walking towards Peter.
Maurice Ravel's La valse lends itself to this trope with its disjointed melodies, jarring dissonances, and wild swings in mood and tempo. It moves deeper into nightmare territory as it progresses, culminating in a violent climax that suggests a demonic orgy gone horribly out of control.
Gioachino Rossini has the second part of the William Tell Overture, appropriately labelled the "Storm" segment. The familiar portion with the full orchestra is probably the scariest of all.
Camille Saint-Saens:
Carnival Of The Animals, particularly "The Chickens", "The Kangaroo", "The Aquarium", "The Donkey" (eerily described as "People with Long Ears") and "The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods", the last of which sounds so mysterious and minimalist to the point of being eerie. The haunting atmosphere of "The Aquarium" was used in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, when Belle first enters The Beasts' castle.
Alfred Schnittke managed to produce an incredibly disturbing instrumental version of nothing less than legendary Stille Nacht (or Silent Night, Holy Night in English). It has to be heard to be believed.
Speaking of Alfred Schnittke, his first Concerto Grosso is certainly a work laden with nightmare fuel. A broken music box-esque prepared piano clanging out some sort of dark nursery rhyme horror movie style; the orchestra and two violins creating a Frankensteined collage of pieces from different eras like a musical seance bringing together the ghosts of Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven and Webern; a recitative that creates a slow crescendo to a scream like a siren in slow motion; a seemingly aimless cadenza; a rondo that seems like it's barreling toward destruction, and a postlude that zooms out to a smoldering aftermath, all of these are contributing factors of a piece chock-full of Nightmare Fuel.
Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire". There had been lots of scary music made before Schoenberg, but he was the first person to make music creepy. In fact, he's been so imitated by modern composers (including on numerous horror film scores) that it can sound a bit dated.
If you ignore all the clichés it has been associated with for the past century or so, his version of "Der Erlkönig" qualifies. A father and his son, who might or might not be seriously ill, are riding home one night when the son starts hallucinating that they are being stalked by the titular Erlkönig, a legendary creature, who comes across like a modern day Serial Killer, luring the boy with gifts in order for him to come along. The son refuses and begs his father to save him. The father doesn't believe his son, until the son dies in agony at the hands of the Erlkönig, his soul taken by force.
Rezső Seress' "Gloomy Sunday", composed in 1933, also known as the Hungarian Suicide Song, is a song made famous by the English translation recorded by Billie Holiday in 1941. It got its nickname thanks to urban legends which are now thought to have been spawned by Holiday's record label, as the original Hungarian version was said to have inspired the suicides of anyone who heard it, and indeed Seress took his own life in 1968. The lyrics describe the narrator's morbid desire to commit suicide in order to join his/her dead lover. However, Holiday's version added a third verse which modulates to a major feel and suggests that the previous verses were merely a fleeting dream. Still, the final lines - "Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you / My heart is telling you how much I wanted you" - leave many disturbingly unanswered questions.
Shostakovich's string quartets are much more intensely personal than his orchestral works, and several of them contain at least one movement, sometimes more, that is downright terrifying.
Although Shosty never quite stood by the "horrors of war" programme associated with Quartet No.3, the hellish fury of the third movement is jarring, as is the climax of the finale in which the sombre theme of the fourth movement is transformed into something much more violent.
Quartet No.8 is his most autobiographical, containing many quotes from his other works, but the most nightmarish movements are the frenzied second movement (particularly the fire-and-brimstone rendition of the "Jewish" theme from the finale of his Piano Trio No.2) and the fourth movement, which is repeatedly punctuated by percussive outbursts intended to mimic KGB goons hammering on someone's door in the middle of the night to send them to the gulags or put them in front of a firing squad.
For real nightmare trips, play his last two string quartets - especially No. 15, his last, with six movements in minor keys and tempi that never rise above Adagio, amounting to half an hour of unrelenting bleakness.
The first half of the second movement of Symphony No.11 (The Year 1905, a musical depiction of the First Russian Revolution) alternates between moments of dramatic bombast and uneasy calm. But it kicks into full Nightmare gear in the second half, starting with the agitated strings and percussion. That builds up until it gives way to a relentless percussion cadence, which in turns alternates with violent outbursts from the rest of the orchestra. The music gives the impression of an unfeeling, unstoppable juggernaut destroying everything in its path.
The opening to L'Oiseau Du Feu (The Firebird) starts very quietly, but already very disturbing. Back in 1910 audiences weren't used to such threatening sounding introduction to a ballet.
Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) also has a very threatening and spooky introduction. Of course, The Rite Of Spring has no happy subject to begin with: a ritual sacrifice of a young virgin in prehistoric pagan Russia! The entire piece sounds brutal, primitive, loud and has a scary feeling to it. Especially first time listeners will almost certainly be unnerved. No wonder that a riot broke loose during its premiere in 1913!
The second act ("Introduction" and "Mysterious Circles Of The Young Girls") sounds even more threatening, because it remains so hauntingly calm and quiet for quite some minutes. After the earth shattering noise of the first act this comes across as being silence before the storm.
The third movement of the Nutcracker Suite, better known as the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" starts rather creepy. It was meant to sound delicately sweet and heavenly, but it does so in a peculiarly Russian way. There is a version on glass harmonica (Tchaikovsky's original choice) that might be even more unnerving.
"Pas de Caractère: Puss in Boots and the White Cat" from the ballet Sleeping Beauty. So hauntingly creepy that Walt Disney used it for his movie Sleeping Beauty in the scene where Princess Aurora is hypnotized by Maleficent to go and prick her finger on the spinning wheel.
A lot of Alexander Scriabin's late pieces are mysterious and spooky, but his Sixth and Ninth Piano Sonatas jump into creepy territory. The composer reportedly refused to play the sixth in public, fearing its darkness.
Like his teacher Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg composed some of the earliest atonal works, with similar creepy results. However, Berg's music was always highly emotionally charged, and the result of that combined with nightmarishness truly comes forth in his ThreeOrchestralPieces. The last movement especially is terrifying in its madness.
Kentucky State University's rendition of the already unsettling "They Hung Their Harps in the Willows". Based off of a quote from Psalm 137 of The Bible, this piece is haunting and unsettling, from the chimes to the low pianos to the loud trumpets and drumbeats that sound exactly a tempest of God's fury and the Israelites' tortured weeping.
The vast majority of Steve Reich's music is Sweet Dreams Fuel, but there are a few notable exceptions.
1988's "Different Trains" is about Reich's experience of travelling across the contiguous United States from New York to Los Angeles to see his parents, who lived at opposite sides of the country, in the 1930s and 1940s, and his contemplation of the fact that had he been living in Europe at the time, the chances were that he, being Jewish, would have been riding "different trains" - the Holocaust trains that took Jewish people to death camps. The work is split into three movements, with the first, titled "Before the War", being a light, upbeat nostalgic piece featuring Reich's governess and a former porter reminiscing about the trains, featuring an American steam whistle that is very deliberately pitched to sound bright and happy. The next, titled "During the War", is a darker, more stark piece about the suffering of Jewish people in Europe under the Nazis. The second movement uses the sound of European steam whistles, which double as air-raid sirens, and they sound absolutely terrifying. The third, "After the War" is a somber reflection on Reich's own nostalgia and on the people who fled Europe during and after the war, riding the same trains Reich rode. The piece utilises snippets of interviews Reich conducted to develop melodies, which are played in time with the music. This makes the music both an ear worm and gives it a very eerie feeling.
2011's "WTC 9/11" is about, you guessed it, September 11th, and it is incredibly disturbing and also an enormous Tear Jerker. It uses the aforementioned speech-to-melody technique from Different Trains, this time using actual NORAD recordings, 911 calls and interviews to describe and give an account of the attack on the World Trade Center and its immediate aftermath. The speech here tends to be distorted, slowed down and pitched, only increasing the uncanny effect from Different Trains. The piece opens and closes with the sound of a phone ringing off the hook, to emphasize the confusion and bewilderment of the atrocity and the inability to comprehend it in the minds of many people. Of particular note is the first movement, simply titled "I. 9/11", which uses "Psycho" Strings to create a feeling of unease and anxiety in the listener.
go ahead plane just crashed — plane just crashed into the World Trade
1983's "The Desert Music" is grandiose and majestic, encapsulating the sheer scale and awe of vast deserts, but also feels extremely uneasy and intimidating, showing how these environments are harsh and dangerous wastelands. It was partly inspired by various deserts like the Sinai desert in the Middle-East, and the White Sands desert in New Mexico. Another part of the inspiration was the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the development of the nuclear bomb in the aforementioned New Mexican desert.
John Coolidge Adams' music is not particularly scary, and he is renowned as a master of minimalist music, but there are exceptions:
"On The Transmigration Of Souls", composed in memoriam to the lives that were lost in 9/11, manages to be a mix of Nightmare Fuel AND Tear Jerker. It starts off with pre-recorded tapes of city ambience, footsteps, and sirens. There are multiple pre-recorded voices saying the names of people who died, and the choir loudly drones out quotes from family members speaking about the loved ones they lost.
is iconic for its use in gothic settings, particularly popular in old horror movies due to its minor key and startling changes from soft to thundering.