The Woods is John Frizzell's latest horror score, and in this conversational interview, the composer discusses the unique relationship between experimental composition and the sounds that consistently make us uneasy, paranoid, or have us turning on all the lights when watching a horror film.

Frizzell's large-scale orchestral writing led to plum assignments like Dante's Peak and Alien Resurrection in 1997. He's also written comedic and mordantly funny music for Beavis and Butt-head Do America and Teaching Mrs. Tingle, respectively, and scored a series of high-profile horror films with sophisticated musical concepts.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Thirt3en Ghosts (2001), Ghost Ship, and Stay Alive were a mix of sequels, remakes, and bodycount films that harkened back to the prolific and popular slasher films of the late seventies and eighties - a once-vilified sub-genre that studios were a bit embarrassed to admit were advantageously profitable.

All of Frizzell's horror work has embraced the power of the orchestra with modern electronics - a major shift when horror films were regarded as cheap and ephemeral box office fodder deserving a quick and simple music score.

Perhaps a major influence on bringing sophistication back to the genre was Christopher Young (think Hellraiser, or even Pranks), plus Marco Beltrami's punchy music for Wes Craven's teen slasher parody, Scream, although Frizzell feels the genre's major influences came much earlier.

John Frizzell: I think it was probably the re-popularization of genre films altogether, with the studios realizing that horror films were enormously popular. Certainly, I look back to films like The Omen as probably the archetype for my generation. Even though I love The Exorcist, it's very, very light on music, and there's no real original score written for it... It's probably the greatest horror film of all-time, but in terms of score, I'd have to come back and say The Omen is really the archetype.

Mark R. Hasan: I guess because there's been sophisticated examples in the past, they're regarded as benchmarks for orchestral scores. For the synth scores of the eighties, sometimes they were good, and sometimes they fell into that dilemma where they had to use electronics for budgetary reasons, and tried to mimic an entire orchestra, with ineffective and sometimes cheesy results.

JF: Certainly the technology has changed an enormous amount. If you need to mimic an orchestra today, you'll get a lot closer to it.

MRH: Much closer to it than before.

JF: Much closer to it than before, but as an example, if you listen to my score for Thirt3en Ghosts, it has a lot of electronics; it's very, very hybrid. I think Ghost Ship leaned probably the most towards orchestra, and this year was Stay Alive; we recorded the orchestra, then manipulated it with the computer, and made it electronic.

MRH: It's funny that, for creating a sense of unease among audiences, one approach that always tends to work so well is where you have a gentle, soothing melodic line in the high registers; then you slowly creep in the lower sonorities, or low brass that rise up in angry clusters.

For some reason that always unsettles audiences, and I find it interesting that maybe it's just something unique to people in general: that we respond well to something that's initially soothing, which we latch onto, and those lower sounds tend to be the things that always scare us.

JF: It's sort of the sucker punch. It does work well, but it's not always the lower sounds that scare us. If you think of one of the greatest scary scores of all-time – Psycho – it's completely filled with surrounding sounds of constant shrill. Maybe higher pitched sounds are more urgent, and lower-pitched sounds are more ominous. Perhaps this goes way, way back to our psyches, in which the growl of an approaching predator functions as a warning, and the shrill sounds of an attacking predator are like a direct assault.

It's fascinating to think about what part of our evolutionary psyche we're playing with; why these sounds have the effect and meaning that they have on us. It's something that I think about a lot: the psychology of music, and what part of our brain we really tap into, like the most primitive emotion that you can recall - Fear.

MRH: When you mentioned Psycho, probably one of my favorite passages happens when Norman Bates arrives at the hotel room where the shower murder's taken place. He stands by the doorway, reels in what's happened, and starts cleaning up the mess. Herrmann just sticks with the strings and produced this eddying effect – different groups of spiraling, interwoven strings - and every so often, after he goes very high, he brings in those amazing string bass that swoop up from beneath. It's an incredible effect, but it's very simple.

JF: Very simple. He was a master of understanding how the human mind responds to patterns, and our sense of pattern recognition by slightly varying that pattern to create intrigue.