Music to Scream to - The Hammer Horror Soundtracks
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Curse of the Werewolf, The Brides of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell – films from the height of Hammer Films’ prolific output in the late 1950s and 1960s. Many of the horrific music soundtracks, carefully calibrated to set the pulse racing, were composed by leading British modernists of the late 20th century. Hammer’s music supervisor Philip Martell hired the brightest young avant-garde composers of the day – the likes of Malcolm Williamson (later Master of the Queen’s Music), Elisabeth Lutyens, Benjamin Frankel and Richard Rodney Bennett made a living scoring music to chill the bones to supplement their concert hall work.
Prising open Dracula’s coffin to unearth the story of Hammer’s modernist soundtracks, composer and pianist Neil Brand explores the nuts and bolts of scary music – how it is designed to psychologically unsettle us – and explores why avant-garde music is such a good fit for horror. On his journey into the abyss, Neil visits the haunted mansion where many of the Hammer classics were made, at Bray Studios in Berkshire, and gets the low-down from Hammer aficionado Wayne Kinsey, film music historian David Huckvale, composer Richard Rodney Bennett, and one of Hammer’s on-screen scream queens, actress Madeline Smith.
Producer: Graham Rogers
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Come on in and get comfy. |
| 0:42.0 | This is seriously from BBC Radio 4, |
| 0:45.7 | and I'm Vanessa Casile. |
| 0:47.6 | If you love unique documentaries, |
| 0:49.8 | this is the podcast for you. |
| 0:52.0 | Each week you'll find two new episodes to discover. |
| 0:55.0 | You've never heard anything quite like this. This is a beautiful piece of 20th century modernist music by Elizabeth Lutchens. And so is this. |
| 1:17.0 | And they are vastly different. You didn't notice? Okay, we'll try this. A cultural |
| 1:32.4 | gulf exists between this by Benjamin Frankl. |
| 1:47.0 | also by Benjamin Frankl. Nope, we're not talking about atonal music versus tonality. |
| 1:59.1 | Lutchens and Frankel were both great modernist composers of the later 20th century. No, we're talking about how |
| 2:05.8 | this music was used and what it was written for, because this is the score for horror film The Sky. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.