Tim Kvasnosky – sound ECD, BUTTER Music
‘The Shining’ is essentially a masterclass in how to unreservedly terrify an audience without resorting to cheap musical jump scares. Kubrick eschews a composer and raids the dusty avant-garde canon – Penderecki, Ligeti, Bartók – and turns their extended string techniques and snarling tonal clusters into the very grammar of fear. It’s terror with a PhD: meticulously dissonant, icily brilliant, and far too sophisticated to let you sleep afterward.
Tōru Takemitsu’s ‘Kwaidan’ score proves you don’t need an orchestra to scare people – just a lute, some echo, and the nerve to let negative space do the killing. It’s horror as minimalism, where silence hits harder than any jump scare and every drip of water feels like divine punishment. Takemitsu basically invented the “prestige horror” vibe before A24 figured out how to sell merch.
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