What makes scary music scary? That's what I was thinking about when I created this piece, which I made in response to a one-week songwriting & recording challenge where the prompt was "fear."  

I started by listing the things I thought would make for a scary song.

First, the tempo would gradually speed up throughout the song, to echo the way your heartbeat speeds up when you're afraid.

Second it would have voices but no words, with the singing sounding like shouts or screams.

Third, it would have some unpredictable, cacophonous elements, like loud, cymbal-heavy drums that start and stop unexpectedly.

Fourth, it wouldn't always have a clearly defined key, so that the listener would feel like the musical tension is never quite resolved.

And fifth, it would incorporate tritones. These are intervals that used to be called "the devil's chord" because medieval composers thought they sounded evil. Nowadays the tritone tends to get used in heavy metal among other places.

(Music nerd alert: I actually didn't quite do the tritones in the end, I just used a lot of minor thirds stacked on top of each other to help create the atonal effect I was describing above. This is kind of similar to a tritone, because the tritone interval (a flat fifth) is the same interval as a minor third plus another minor third. But doing it the way I did it results in something more like a bunch of diminished chords, which are not quite the same thing, even though they also can sound unsettling. But tritones is what I was originally going for.)

So anyway! When I combined all the ingredients described above, I ended up with the recording you'll find here. My buddies in Sync or Swim assured me this has a near-zero chance of getting placed in film or TV, because music supervisors reportedly find it difficult to use songs where the tempo changes throughout.  It was fun to make, though!

My original title for this was "Too Late, Run!" but my colleagues said this didn't really match the music. After waiting a few weeks and then giving it a cold listen, I decided they were right. What really comes across to me in this recording is that the vocals sound like demonic/schizoid/insane voices; it's like a nightmare of insanity more than it's like a monster chasing you.  So I changed the title to "Funky Madhouse."