A jump-scare exercise, and why the rules for scoring tension are conventions rather than laws.
Thriller isn’t one genre. Psychological, action, horror-adjacent — what they share isn’t subject matter but an effect they’re trying to produce. Which leaves the only question worth asking: what actually makes the thrill?
Studying with Nick Ingman — composer, arranger, session conductor — we took a short film with a jump scare, a face appearing suddenly, and scored it three ways. Music before the visual. Music on the nose, hitting the frame. Music just after.
The obvious answer is on the nose, and it was fine. Unremarkable.
Music before the visual got a laugh. The cue announced what was coming, the audience arrived ahead of the image, and by the time the face appeared the fear had already been spent. Warning people is the one thing that reliably destroys a scare.
The interesting version was the late one. The image lands in silence and the music catches up — which is roughly what your own nervous system does.
None of that could have been derived from first principles, and I’ve never found a rulebook that would have predicted it.
It isn’t arbitrary either. These are conventions rather than laws: learned, cultural, and entirely real inside an audience that has learned them. Nobody is taught that a tilted camera means something is wrong, and nobody needs to be — a Dutch angle works because the grammar of framing is understood at a level that never requires a label.
The same goes for the gesture itself. A “ta-da” is comic or frightening depending on which notes you use, and when I taught this to film students the hardest thing to explain was why a cue they’d written was too on the nose, or why it read as funny when they’d intended dread. It isn’t only taste. Sometimes the gesture doesn’t belong to the vocabulary the scene has established. More often, to my ear, the problem is that it’s worn out — or that it’s supporting something the picture is already showing perfectly well.
The question turns up in very different rooms — zombie horror in Urban Scumbags, a convoy hit by an IED for a US military film, a Mitsubishi commercial where the car behaves like an action figure dodging supernatural threats, and a man creeping through a forest to kill a German soldier in Saved By Grace.
What changes across all of them is what the music is being asked to do. Opening credits can carry a theme. The scenes themselves usually can’t — they want texture and metric dissonance under the action, not a melody competing with it.
Often they want less than that. I’ve shown students fight scenes that play better with almost nothing under them: silence, or percussion alone. The scene has already set its terms, and the score’s job can be to stay out of the way of what the audience is doing with it.
I’ve watched this happen at the top of the business. At the Newman Stage, sitting in on Alan Silvestri’s sessions for Shawn Levy on Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, I saw both sides of it. One scene had horns added to make it feel more presidential. Another — a beautifully orchestrated cue for a giant octopus coming alive out of a picture — was dropped in favour of silence, because it was too much. Neither decision was about whether the music was good.
Because the other half of this isn’t on the screen at all. What a sound means depends on what the listener has already heard — consonance and dissonance, and timbres they’d recognise by sound instantly and never be able to name. Those associations were built by exposure, not instruction — the same way taste is.
There’s a version of this every composer has heard. A director says they don’t like the oboe in a cue. The composer takes the oboe out. It emerges later that the oboe was never the sound they meant — they knew exactly which one was bothering them, and reached for the wrong word.
Which is where the conventions actually live. Not in the score, and not in the rulebook I never found. In the audience.