As an anxious ’80s baby, the first bits of pop culture to terrify me came in the form of laughter — first, the Count’s demented cackles on Sesame Street, and, later, Vincent Price’s bwah-ha-has on Thriller.

But the first pop song to give me bad dreams was Taco’s Puttin’ On the Ritz, a campy Irving Berlin redo that turned my kid-blood cold in the summer of 1983. Without any context, I heard something malevolent in that “super-duper” refrain and concluded that Gary Cooper lived in hell.

Since then, I’ve always wondered whether music can be frightening in and of itself. Slayer’s Reign in Blood was scary because owning it on cassette frightened my parents (and my ability to scare them scared me). Composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was instantly frightening because it was titled Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Same for Sheer Hellish Miasma, Kevin Drumm’s dyspeptic noise opus from 2002. As a wide-eared adult, I like frightening music, but I rarely find it scary unless something outside of the sound tells me to be afraid.

Now Colin Stetson is telling me to be afraid, and it’s working. The saxophone strongman has generated piles of impressive recordings over the past decade, many of them made with a circular breathing technique that allows him to spray continuous information from his horn. But as dense and depleting as his data-jazz can feel, it’s never given me the creeps.

Is Hereditary really the best horror movie in years? Sure sounds like it

Not the case for Hereditary director Ari Aster, who reportedly wrote the script for his phenomenal new horror movie while listening to Stetson’s old solo albums. When he was finished, he called on the saxophonist to score his film.

Since its opening, Hereditary has been soaking up all kinds of gushy praise, and Stetson’s music has everything to do with it. Think of how the strings in Psycho evoke a thrusting knife, or how those accelerating duh-nuhs from Jaws evoke a swimmer’s kicking feet. Stetson does similar work in Hereditary, producing deep drones and manic babble, artfully conjuring an unseen evil that refuses to show itself throughout so much of the film.

Cool move, suggesting a metaphysical presence with such physical sounds, and, yes, this soundtrack was made almost entirely with human breath — via various clarinets, via Stetson’s gigantic bass sax, via his own throat. All of that carbon dioxide pushing out of Stetson’s lungs makes us more attentive to how the actors are breathing on screen, whether they’re sighing, sobbing, wailing or freaking out. In one pivotal scene, a character confesses that he just felt the air in the room “flex,” and it’s as if Stetson’s bleats have suddenly penetrated the narrative airspace.

Obviously, Stetson has made Hereditary into a film worth listening to, but his score still doesn’t clarify my question about whether music itself can be frightening. I wonder if it comes down to biology more than culture. Loud music might scare us because it awakens genetic memories of natural disasters. Faster rhythms might scare us because they evoke a fight-or-flight heartbeat. Noisy music might scare us because it reminds us of social panic and chaos. But intention still matters, right? When critics first encountered the screaming solos on John Coltrane’s 1966 album Ascension, they heard anger and anguish. That disappointed Coltrane. He was going for the ecstatic. But what if it’s all of the above?

Meanwhile, moviegoers have taken to the digital plane to argue over the final scenes of Hereditary. Some say the film’s ending was too predictable, but if that final scene counts as formulaic, I probably need to watch more horror movies. Maybe I was more sympathetic to Aster’s big finish because my ears were locked on Stetson’s horns, which were suddenly belching up weird, golden perfume.

I don’t think the film’s final scene works without the music, but the music certainly works outside of the scene. I know because I streamed the grand finale portion of the soundtrack on repeat during my ride home from a matinee screening of Hereditary. Outside of that dark, indulgently air-conditioned movie theatre, Stetson’s playing felt strange, warm, majestic and bright — like beams of mid-afternoon daylight shining down from an alien sun.

And, yeah, I saw Hereditary in the daytime. No more Taco-level nightmares for me. As if adulthood in America isn’t scary enough.

— By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 29th, 2018