A bit of background: At my church, while everyone’s leaving at the end of the service, the organist always plays some instrumental piece. Today, due no doubt to the proximity to Halloween, the piece chosen was Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Needless to say, the congregation appreciated it.
But why is the afore-said piece associated with Halloween or horror? Is there some classic horror movie which featured it, and others followed suite? Wikipedia lists a great many instances of the piece in popular culture, but as is so common for Wikipedia, they’re heavily slanted towards the popular culture of the past decade or two, with nothing that looks likely as an origin, and the horror associations were already securely in place by the time of most of the listed references (maybe all of them, but they’re not dated, so it’s hard to say). I have the mental image of a black-and-white movie villain sitting down dramatically at an organ in his underground lair to play this piece, but I’m not sure where I would have gotten that image, given that I saw few or no horror movies as a kid. Does anyone else know?
I have that mental image, too, and if it exists anywhere except in our heads, it is from The Phantom of the Opera. I think the one I grew up with and loved as a kid was the 1962 version with Herbert Lom, but I guess it’s possible it was the 1943 one with Nelson Eddy. (The 1962 version is in color, but we had a black & white TV…)
I’m going to guess it’s because it’s a heavy piece written in an minor scale. I remember from long ago that JSB wrote some pieces as a shake-down for newly installed organs, and this piece is mechanically challenging in my mind to fit the bill. If the organ hasn’t got the ‘lungs’ or if the linkages weren’t installed properly, it will sound horrible.
Other than that, hearing dark, heavy, energetic music when Nosferatu, Dracula or Your Favorite Villan is on the screen just fits.
One rather odd place it is played is in the original(James Caan version) of Rollerball.
At the very beginning of the movie the screen is dark and gradually lightens as TaFiDM is played. What you are seeing is actually a darkened rollerball stadium, in which the lights are gradually being turned on as the maintenance crew gets the place set up before gametime.
Didn’t James Mason, as Capt. Nemo, play it in 20000 Leagues Under the Sea?
It also is one of the musical pieces featured in the original Fantasia. But that was an orchestral version. Still good, but I prefer a pipe organ.
First time I ever heard it was on a record belonging to my father, played by E. Power Biggs.
I suspect it’s because it’s a familiar , short, and ominous-sounding piece of prgan music. For the record, it’s not what the Phantom of the Opera played in the book, the 1925 film or the Broadway Show – those were all “Don Juan Triumphant”, a made-up piece. From what i can recall of the 1943 version, it wasn’t in that, either.
What’s interesting to me is what Universal’s music people decided was horror music – it was swan Lake. That’s the only music played (as background at a concert, and during the opening credits) in the original 1931 Dracula. They used it in the beginning of the original The Mummy, too, and I think they used it elsewhere. David Skal, in Hollywood Gothic, claims that in the early thirties “Swan Lake” was seen as some sort of horror theme – possibly it had some association now obscure. It never seemed horrific to me at all. We were just watching The Mummt tonight while carving pumpkins and the music seemed as far from horror as you can get.
I was right! It was in the 1962 Phantom! (Not that that’s definitively where Chronos got his image, but it’s where I got mine!) I think I even referred to the Toccata and Fugue as the “Phantom of the Opera music” when I was a kid.
And just to set the record straight, I despise Andrew Lloyd Weber.
It was featured prominently in the movie, Phantasm (sometime in the 70’s). It got under my skin when I saw that movie as a kid and I’ve always associated it with funerals and horror ever since.
So at one time, Swan Lake was familiar, of the appropriate length, and ominous-sounding?
I’m not disputing what you say, but this shows that the characteristics associated with the toccata are not inherent in the music, but are ones we subconciously impose onto it. I’m no film buff, but Google turns up its prominent use in 1931 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which suggests to me a likely origin of its place in popular culture.
I posted in Cafe Society some time ago an ID request for a French cartoon/anime series I saw here in the UK during the 80s. It was a bit of an odd ball series, one was fairly hard SF for a kids show, the other was a look at how the body worked where nerves, blood cells etc were replaced by small people.
The SF series had TAFIDM as the theme to the opening credits, against some sort of disaster and space ship launch IIRC. Quite dramatic and one piece of classical music that stayed a favourite from childhood.
1.) Just because the one piece was, I suggest chosen for that reason doesn’t mean that the other was…
but
2.) Having just watched The Mummy again, I noticed that, yeah, the opening to Swan Lake does get momentous and ominous at the end, so maybe that’s one reason it ended up as Universal’s horror music du jour in the early thirties. Which makes it no less bizarre as a choice for The Mummy.
Just in case you didn’t get an answer (I’ve seen the question asked more than once), the series you are speaking of are part of a larger series called “Il était une fois…” or “Once upon a time…”. They’re really great. WikiLink
OTOH, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is the opening number in Fantasia. It was not associated at all with horror in that film, the animation was a semi-abstract impression of an orchestra playing.
This was an orchestrated version, though – not the organ version.
A friend and I once started riffing on the impracticality of the Phantom getting a full-scale pipe organ into his underground lair…and what more practical instruments he could have played. And how TaFiDm would sound on a ukulele, or a harmonica, or a banjo. Or the bagpipes. Or a jew’s harp. You get the picture.
