Glass' signature orchestral sound introduces us to the "safe and normal" world of academia as a graduate student protagonist works on a thesis about urban legends. To echo the premise, Glass uses choral chanting to haunt the viewer throughout the film. This score's a bit of an exception on the list since it's not a synthesizer score strictly speaking, but the gasping pipe organs and piano parts both run parallel to the tradition of synth horror music that came before it and proved steadily influential to the host of experimentally minded film composers that followed.Ĭandyman's titular boogeyman appears when someone chants his name five times in front of a mirror. Renowned minimalist composer Philip Glass has provided hypnotic soundscapes for films like Koyaanisqatsi and The Hours, but he hasn't done much work in horror cinema aside from Bernard Rose's Candyman. It's hard to speculate why Zulawski eventually excised them from the film, but perhaps he decided its alien sex scenes were already sulky and seedy enough.- Colin Joyce The pieces included there were some of Korzynski's first forays into electronic composition, but his efforts seem to anticipate the fair amount of synth-based club music that'd come over the following decade. It's one of the few bright moments that made its way into the score, but the reissue label Finders Keepers uncovered the fact that Korzynski initially recorded about double the number of cues that actually made it into the film, which were eventually compiled into the genre-agnostic romp that is the soundtrack's 2012 reissue. Just before a climactic chase scene, composer Andrzej Korzynski lets loose the kind of gentle drum machine rhythm and neon-tinged electro synth lines that wouldn't sound out of place banging out of clubs in the few years following the film's 1981 release. The freaked-out cues that appear in the director's cut of Andrzej Zulawski's Possession are almost universally spine-prickling, but toward the end of the film there's a hint at something a little more multi-dimensional at play.