Have you tried watching Jurassic Park with the sound muted? The subtitles tell you what’s happening on-screen. But without its now iconic background music, you just don’t feel the terror of the T-Rex creeping up on the main characters. It is said that one of the major contributing factors to the huge success of the 2025 blockbuster Dhurandhar was its background score. This piece in the BBC traces the earliest use of background music to lift a movie to the 1960 classic, Psycho. The piece’s author, Thomas Hobbs makes the case that without composer Bernard Herrmann’s score, Alfred Hitchcock’s horror would never have become an all-time classic at all.
The film almost didn’t get made. Paramount, wary of such gruesome material, gave Hitchcock a paltry budget and declined to produce it. The music rescued it. “Psycho was certainly not a bad film before it was scored, but it lacked tension,” explains Steven C Smith, author of a new book on the Hitchcock-Herrmann partnership. Herrmann supplied it with one radical choice: an all-string, 50-person orchestra he called a “return to pure ice water” and a “black-and-white sound” to match the photography. For most of the film the strings are muted. Then comes the shower. “Suddenly with the shower scene, the mutes are off the strings, and they screech animalistically,” says Smith. To composer Rachel Zeffira, the cue is the film itself: “That music is everything. It’s the birds, it’s the bees, and it’s the voices in the back of your head.”
The best passages portray the craftsman. Herrmann read the novel behind every film before scoring a note, so the music carried real empathy. “Every note Herrmann played had meaning,” says Zeffira, who notes that even the “dejected and anxious” theme trailing Norman Bates somehow “makes you feel sorrow for a killer.” Years of radio work, including Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast, taught him to conjure images from sound and to use silence as its own instrument. He was famously prickly – his daughter said he “didn’t suffer fools gladly” – though Smith insists he was gentler than his reputation, a man who “gave unconditional love to his cats.” Hitchcock had not even wanted music in the shower scene. Herrmann made him watch it both ways. “Oh yes, we must use it!” the director conceded. “But I thought you didn’t want my music here?” the composer needled, before Hitchcock scoffed: “My boy, improper suggestion.”
It is strongest tracing how far those violins travelled. George Martin modelled his string arrangement for The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby on the Psycho score; John Williams borrowed its menace for the bass notes of Jaws; Busta Rhymes and a long line of rappers sampled it. Herrmann, argues composer Michael Vincent Waller, “knew how to loop these little nihilistic fragments,” so that “the way he was conducting film music was a lot like how rap producers chop up beats.” His verdict is the article’s title and real thesis: “The Psycho music is a reference whenever you want to build tension… Whenever you hear creepy violins in a horror movie, or feel like a film score has become its own character, then that can all be traced back to Psycho.”
Herrmann never quite got his due in life. He fell out with Hitchcock in 1966 over a pop score he refused to write, and revived his reputation late, with the jazz of Taxi Driver, whose final moments quote Psycho’s three-note theme. He knew exactly what a score was for. As he put it in one of his last interviews, “A composer writes a score for a picture, and he gives it life. Like a fellow goes to a doctor, says, ‘I’m dying,’ and the doctor cures him.”
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