Research Into and Use of Music

This post is about the music used in horror trailers.

Research:

I watched a couple of horror trailers to see what type of music they used and if they used more than one music track or just stuck to one. I found that they tended to have a backing track that contained no lyrics and they used multiple different music pieces. Horror trailers also usually have the music speed up near the climax of the trailer and then suddenly go quiet before the jump scare. Me and my partner have decided that we will do this in our trailer as we think it will add to the scare element.

Examples:

Music We Used:

We wanted to start the trailer off with a calm atmosphere and then build to a more dramatic piece of music. These are the different options I looked at:

I listened to this piece of music and right off the bat didn't think it was right for our trailer. It is too suspenseful for this part of the trailer and didn't fit with the opening sequence.

I looked at this one because it said for film trailers in the title. After listening to it I felt that it was too fast pace and got very suspenseful quickly. I spoke to Hibah and she agreed with me that it wasn't what we were looking for to start our trailer.

Hibah suggested that I listened to this one so I did. I liked the beginning as it was soft and was calm. It also worked very well with the shots we had taken for the beginning of the trailer (the pan of the houses, Anmol (Brooke) on the phone etc.) So we decided to use this piece called ' The Light Between Oceans - Trailer Music - (Ethos Music - In The Beginning)'

When paranormal events started to occur in the house we wanted to build suspense and so I looked at some tense, loud pieces of music. The options I looked at were:

I felt like this one was too slow. It definitely was eerie but didn't suit the action scene where this was going to go. It was very slow paced even though it had that creep element.

I liked this music clip as it was definitely suspenseful. However, I think for our trailer it didn't suit as our action sequence near the end is much faster and I don't think that this music builds up as much as we wanted.

This is the music track my partner and I decided on. After listening to it together, we agreed that this would work well in our trailer. Then we played it behind our trailer and the action sequence fit perfectly with it. As we did this we found that we only needed the first two minutes which worked well with the visuals. It builds tension and the fright factor. It is called: 'Most Epic Scary Horror Music | album "Severed 2" preview by Colossal Trailer Music'.