Halloween is a time when horror scores ring out with menace across popular culture. The musical cues of slasher franchises like Friday the 13th transcend their source material, though it goes deeper than that. The best horror soundtracks embody the provocative themes of their respective films, abrasive and experimental, similarly to horror cinema itself—a misfit genre forever situated on the fringes .

Horror cinema is often produced independently, outside the purview of the major studios, which allows its composers the freedom to experiment outside established boundaries. Many from the past 50 years have been produced electronically, the low budgets encouraging a scrappy sense of innovation, and conceptually, many of these classics stand tall alongside modern experimental music.

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