The menacing sound of a shark swimming slowly through water. The punctured, staccato shrieks of a knife as it tears into an unsuspecting woman’s flesh as she showers in a roadside motel. A repeated ghostly chant repeats itself as a hockey-masked killer stalks and slashes his way through the forest. These are the sounds of fear that make up our collective cinematic nightmares. If a film is a successful collaboration between what is seen and heard onscreen, then score composers are just as responsible for that success as directors and screenwriters, but are all too often relegated to the shadows. After all, what’s Halloween (1978) without John Carpenter’s iconic score? Suspiria (1977) without the otherworldly sounds of Goblin? Whatever power these films would retain would surely pale in comparison lacking the score that lies at their heart.
Tom Schraeder, score composer for new Bryan Bertino (The Strangers, The Dark and the Wicked) directed Paramount+ original horror film Vicious (2025), knows plenty about using music and sound to create fear, terror, and suspense. The new supernatural thriller starring Dakota Fanning (Ripley, The Alienist) about a young woman who has to survive the night when she is gifted a malevolent box that unleashes psychological terror and savage, demonic violence. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Mr. Schraeder and pick his brain about his process, collaborators, and inspirations behind creating the music behind some of the scariest horror movies being made today.
SW: I read that you had composed the score to Vicious to the script before anything was even shot. That’s fascinating. Could you talk about that process just a bit?
Tom Schraeder: Sure, I prefer to score to the script. Dark and the Wicked was done in the same way. I started writing and reading screenplays as a kid and I love reading them in general. Being a songwriter/lyricist, having 120 pages of beautiful, almost lyrical, dialogue to choose from feels very natural. I’ll just use a guitar or a piano, whatever’s close by, and just see what comes out musically as I’m reading. I get obsessed with the script until I know it inside and out, which helps me know where I’m coming from musically.
SW: That’s fascinating and really shines a light on the film making process and how these different elements fit together. Outside of scoring music for film, you make your own music and have an extensive history in the indie music world. How different, if at all, do you find it to be from your film work?
Tom Schraeder: The transition from touring and being a recording artist to scoring film is that I’m really working to realize someone else’s vision which is really quite nice after writing for myself for over 25 years to actually come in with an elaborate vision and all I have to do is stay in these boundaries is really nice. It allows me to get out of my own way. Vicious was a lot less DIY than Dark and the Wicked. We had an office actually on the Paramount lot, so I was able to create and do everything like I would my own record and was then able to send it off to an orchestrator take all of the madness and transform it into this amazing string quartet.
SW: Tell me about some of the people you worked with as on the Vicious score.
Tom Schderaer: We were lucky enough to work with some incredible performers. Stan Harrison who has worked with David Bowie. He’s played on pretty much every one of my favorite albums. Also, Clive Deamer who has played with Radiohead and Portishead as well.
SW: That’s an impressive collection of people making music together. When you hear the score it’s full of haunting piano melodies set against foreboding strings. It is, at time, dissonant and abrasive and I know that some of the more interesting and scary sounds came from something you constructed during scoring called a ‘terror box,’ and I was hoping you could explain.
Tom Schraeder: For years, I was trying to come up with something fun and ugly and horrific that I go consistently go to, to make this dissonant, aggressive noise. I got an old cigar box guitar and ripped out the bottom. Then, I got some wood to make a box. Strangely enough, it’s roughly the size as Polly (Dakota Fanning)’s box in Vicious! Then, I added a bunch of pencil sharpeners and rulers and different chimes. We added some reverb and some pedals and we had a ‘terror box.’
SW: That’s the coolest thing I have ever heard. (Laughs) Both collaborations with director Bryan Bertino have been quite bleak. One could argue that Vicious ends on a somewhat happier note, but Dark and the Wicked is especially, well, dark. Is that type of material something that you find yourself personally drawn to?
Tom Schraeder: I wasn’t at first. I was really reluctant to watch anything that wasn’t a romantic comedy or an Oscar-winning drama. Probably around 2018 I began to understand how beautiful the artform of horror actually is. I have been lucky to work with filmmakers who have pointed me in the right direction, so I have fallen so in love with the genre. The fans and the community as well. It’s incredible and kind and full of just brilliant film fans.
SW: Bouncing off that for one final question, what scares you, Tom Schraeder?
Tom Schraeder: Funny enough, noise. I am sensitive to sound. With scoring, I try to recreate what causes my own anxiety. Once I get my anxiety to a peak point, I’ll stop and go for a walk. I know I have done my job. Especially with The Dark and the Wicked, the idea was to have a sustained panic attack and making the listener not be able to stop that panic attack. Vicious was all about being inside of a psychological spiral, so what we did was we utilized all the sounds that Polly (Dakota Fanning) interacts with in the film. I tried to replicate how scary life can sound out of just the normal surroundings once all these sounds start to build up in all this cacophonous angst.