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It’s a simple, repetitive theme: just two alternating notes, increasing in tempo and volume as danger nears. But for anyone who has seen the movie “Jaws,” those two notes are enough to make you think twice about taking a dip in the ocean.
Similarly, the theme from the 1978 thriller “Halloween,” composed by director John Carpenter, can bring the hair on the back of your neck to the upright position in just a handful of menacing notes.
What is it about the music in these films that helped elevate them to legend status in the pantheon of scary movies?
Tim Bickford, half of the start-up Bearded Lady Music, says the best horror movie score isn’t one that dominates a film but one woven so organically into the story that a moviegoer isn’t consciously aware of it.
“‘Jaws’ is a great example,” he explained. “The shark has a theme, so every time the shark pops up, you’ve got that ‘Jaws’ theme playing.
“There’s one scene where a kid is wearing a fake fin and pretending to be the shark, and it’s scary the first time you’re watching it, because you think, ‘There’s the shark!’ But there’s something a little off, because the theme music isn’t playing there. Then the shark comes in later, and the music is back.
“Little subtleties like that with the music can really heighten or pull back the tension, and Steven Spielberg and John Williams [who composed the music for ‘Jaws’] are some of the best at doing that.”
Mr. Bickford, a 2002 graduate of Hampton Bays High School, has had a lifelong fascination with music. He started playing piano at age 6, then took up the saxophone in third grade, playing in the Baymen’s concert and jazz bands. He added guitar to his musical repertoire as a teenager and headed off to the Berklee College of Music in Boston to study music business and management.
“I knew I wasn’t going to be a virtuoso performer,” he said. “I was more interested in the process around music, the collaboration, getting people together and understanding what works in what setting. That’s what I love about what I’m doing now—it’s like putting a puzzle together, finding the right piece of music for the right scene, and building on that.”
In his senior year at Berklee, Mr. Bickford landed an internship with BMG Music Publishing in Los Angeles. He’s lived in Los Angeles ever since, steadily moving up in the music business. When he’s not working on side projects with Bearded Lady partner Mandi Collier, he works as director for film and TV at Razor & Tie, one of the largest privately owned independent music labels and publishing companies in North America.
“I get to be on both sides of the coin,” he said. “With Razor & Tie, I’m working with our roster there, pitching bands to TV and film studios, to other music supervisors who are working on their own products, trying to license our music for their shows and films.
“With Bearded Lady, I’m on the other side of the process, licensing music from other labels and artists directly. It gets both ends of the creative itch scratched.”
Most recently, Bearded Lady Music worked with slasher-movie director Mickey Keating on “Psychopaths,” to be released December 1. This is the duo’s fifth project with Mr. Keating.
“I was never a huge horror fan, but I like a lot of metal music and hard rock stuff,” Mr. Bickford said. “As I’ve been working in music longer, my tastes have kind of spread to the extremes on either end, and horror movies fit into that same pattern. They take an idea and put it to an extreme. That gives me some fun opportunities to go a little out of the norm when I’m looking for music for a particular project.
“On Mickey’s projects, there’s a level of trust now, because we’ve done five films together. He’s a music lover too, so he brings a lot of his own ideas to the process, but he’s open to changing things out and he’s receptive to our ideas. We’ll start with a conversation with Mickey, then we’ll see the script or watch an early edit of the film. From there, we’ll take his notes, put them together without notes, and go from there.
“Some scenes dictate the style of music and the energy it needs to enhance something, or play in juxtaposition to something,” he continued. “We listen to new music all the time, and sometimes we have something in our personal catalog that we’ve set aside—something we thought was cool but didn’t have a home for it yet. That happened with this film, ‘Psychopaths.’ There were some pieces of music that Mandi and I had come across that we thought were really cool, but we didn’t have the right project for it yet. Then ‘Psychopaths’ pops up, and the perfect scene for this piece of music is right there.”
With his wife, Allison, expecting their first child in December, Mr. Bickford is moving his career closer to home, where he’ll work out of Razor & Tie’s Manhattan office.
“My whole family is still in Hampton Bays,” he said. “My dad and my brother are dentists in the same practice [Bickford Dental]. It will be a lot nicer to be car distance away rather than plane distance away. It will be an adjustment—my entire professional career has been here in Los Angeles. It’s a little scary, but exciting.”
on Oct 23, 2017