It appears all the way through, yosemitebabe – the most distinctive part is that choral stuff, like when Damien is riding his tricycle along the landing and knocks his mother over the bannister rail to her death. Here’s a link to the lyrics of what the choir are singing. Go to the part called Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.
Ironically, the piece is best-known over here (I’m in Britain) as the Old Spice music 'cos it was used as the background for a series over aftershave lotion ads, which weren’t spooky. I agree it’s great music.
definately Tocatta and Fugue in D minor by bach
Carmina Burana is good choice
Flight of the Baba Yaga-Mussorgsky
Mahler’s 5th symphony definately gives off spooky vibes if u lesten to the music
Stravinsky’s rite of spring is another good one.
I’ll have to watch the film again. It’s been so long. I know the Goldsmith score by heart (being a big Goldsmith fan) and I just don’t recall any other music being used in the film. His creepy choral music was quite evocative, and used throughout the film with great effectiveness. (But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a bit of Orff music spliced in there somewhere!)
Not sure if it classifies as actaul classical music, but Glen Danzig’s Black Aria sounds like it fits what you are looking for. Don’t let Danzig’s name fool you, it is very dramatic.
Well, I was going to recommend György Ligeti’s work, but Zweistein quite properly beat me to it. Listen to this guy’s music, and then just to make yourself feel better, keep in mind that he was born in ["]Transylvania](http://us.imdb.com/BornWhere?Dicios�nmartin,+Transylvania,+Romania.+[now+T%EErnaveni). Yikes!
Bela Bartok’s short opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911)
Bela Bartok’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin (1918)
Alban Berg’s operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935)
Benjamin Britter’s Nocturne for tenor and small orchestra (1958)
George Crumb’s Night Music I (1963)
Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969)
Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question (1908)
The three central movements of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 (1905)
Sergei Prokofiev’s cantata We Are Seven (1917) and Violin Sonata No. 1 (1938)
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s tone poem *The Isle of the Dead *(1909)
Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Score (1930)
Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus (1910) and late piano sonatas (1911-13)
Dmitri Shostakovitch’s Symphony No. 14 (1969) and String Quartets Nos. 8, 13, and 15 (1962, 1970, 1974)
Edgard Varese’s Arcana (1927)
Iannis Xenakis’s Bohor I (1962)
Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of Death) for piano and orchestra. It’s a set of variations on the Gregorian chant Dies Irae. A great performance of this is by the Chicago Symphony conducted by Reiner with Bryon Janis on piano. If your hair isn’t standing on end by the close of this piece, there’s something wrong with you.
Try the last movement of Gustav Holst’s “Planets.” I heard it live, with a ghostly choir offstage, and it creeped me out of existence, even from the affordable seats.
Oooooh, wait, I got another one…Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony in E minor.
Written in 1947-48, programmers thought of it as the composer’s reaction to the threat of global annihilation.
The opening Allegro is cacaphonous and filled with swirling disorder; the bleak Moderato contains a short motif of three repeated notes and includes "one of the most terrifying crescendos heard since Boris Godunov…
“Yet it was the final movement, the Epilogue, which gave rise to the most intensive comment and speculation. In contrasts to the frightening crescendos and savage tuttis of the preceding parts, the finale was composed in an unbroken pianissimo from first to last, but such a strange, desolate and unearthly pianissimo as had never been heard before…a prophetic vision of a lifeless planet, with aimless clouds drifting across a panorama of silent desolation and tortured phantoms…”
Vaughan Williams dismissed this whole interpretation, but what does HE know? It’s still excruciatingly spooky.
(Quotes from the notes by Edward Johnson to the RCA Victor recording, with Andre Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, 1968)