Scoring Fear: Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves on the Sound of Dread
> "No one noticed that there's music, but they love the scene."
>
> Ryan Holladay
Tension is something that's built before the scare. Cross-Conversations: Horror, presented with MUBI, puts people who make horror films and horror games in the same room, and the first conversation brought together two composers who build it for a living.
Ryan Holladay is a composer and sound artist based in Los Angeles. With his brother Hays and director Zach Cregger, he scored _Weapons_ , and with Hays he scored this year's Resident Evil, which opened in September. Before the films, the brothers made a location-aware album, _The National Mall_ , in 2011, music that only plays where you stand. We wrote about it back then on Killscreen. He's now scoring a game called Abelina.
Jason Graves is the composer behind the original Dead Space trilogy, and the first game won the BAFTA for original score in 2009. He scored _Until Dawn_ and _The Dark Pictures Anthology_ , including this year's Directive 8020, and Still Wakes the Deep, whose score was built around a custom metal sculpture shaped like an oil rig, known as the Rig.
_This conversation was_ recorded live_on Oct. 13, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity._
**Jamin Warren: I want to talk about creating the feeling of dread, the tension that's built before the scare. Ryan, something I noticed seeing _Resident Evil_ is these quiet passages, the abandoned house, this blackness, the negative space that kind of gets filled in, and that's what creates that atmosphere of fear. It's a travel film, so there are often these sequences where the character's just walking. Can you walk us through how you plan unease when nothing is happening onscreen?**
**Ryan Holladay:** It gets filled in, or it doesn't get filled in. There's that term "minimum viable product," and I think Zach's approach is often minimum viable score: whatever the least amount to do the job is, and that's especially true for a dread moment. In _Resident Evil_ there's the moment where he's walking through the woods with his phone as his flashlight, looking for something. We had built this whole collage out of brass, out of horns, and it sounded cool. And then one day Zach was like, "What if we mute this?" And it was like, that's scarier. There are a number of times where we'll put a lot of time into creating something very layered, and ultimately it only needs this one element. If it's drawing too much attention to itself, it's not working.
There's a scene in _Weapons_ where the mother comes out of the house with the scissors. It's a long one-shot, and she walks to the car. Zach sent me a review praising the scene, and it said the whole thing plays out in total silence with no music, which is not true. There is music there. But he was like, this is the best compliment you could hope for: no one noticed that there's music, but they love the scene.
**Jamin Warren: Jason, does what Ryan's talking about have crossover with the way you approach building that sense of dread?**
**Jason Graves:** Absolutely. I'll speak more from the game perspective. The biggest upside and downside to games, especially scary games, is trying to provide that sense of tension over an indeterminate amount of time. _Dead Space_ has music playing throughout, but layer one, of four, is mostly a full string ensemble playing almost random notes. The music would say: play any note, _ppp_ , _sul tasto_ , muted. You get this beautiful, tense, almost jazz chord that would be impossible to write unless you had 50 staves, one for each musician. It's aleatoric, so the players decide when they're going to do something, and you get a couple of minutes of music that sounds more like room tone than anything else.
The original audio director for _Dead Space_ said, "I want you to write music so that as we're walking down this hallway, it gets so tense that a little floppy stuffed bunny rabbit could jump out like in cartoon form and go, 'Hi, guys!' and you would still throw your controller across the room and scream." It didn't matter what the reveal was. And if the player decides not to go down the hallway and turns around and leaves, the music can respond accordingly.
**Jamin Warren: People have different triggers in horror. I watched _Resident Evil_ as a parent, I have a four-and-a-half-year-old, and there are notes of parenthood throughout the film. Even though every project is different, are there musical elements you find are universal, things you can lean into that create a good base for that dread?**
**Jason Graves:** I have a very methodical, researched-for-the-past-20-years, three-prong answer. Number one, the unknown is always scarier than the known. The shark fin under the water, the hand under the bed. Once the audience can attach physical recognition to something, in the '80s it's just a guy in a suit, now it's just a CG monster, the tension's released. So I try to come up with sounds that are really unfamiliar, from a synthesizer or a coffee cup. Plus, that's fun.
The second is that baby-crying register. We have a puppy right now, and he's adorable, but he has this really high A natural or B-flat when he barks, and it makes me jump even if he's in the other room. Screechy violins, the _Psycho_ string stabs: anything in that upper register, especially if it comes at you really quickly, puts humanity in an uncomfortable position.
The opposite end is any big, low, massive sound, especially if it hits and goes away and comes back in some irregular rhythm. This is all prehistoric stuff. Giant creatures are going to eat you and your family. It's coming up with versions of these sounds that tap into our survival instincts, for ourselves or for our family.
**Ryan Holladay:** That's such an awesome answer. I need to be taking notes. This is a masterclass.
**Jamin Warren: Jason, you're dealing with players who are moving through a world at different speeds. Tell me a little about what you've learned along the way in terms of accounting for the interactive element, so it feels natural for players.**
**Jason Graves:** We can put a tag on a creature, or on a doorway at the end of the hall, and tell the program: as the player's distance changes, do the following things. Make the music scarier, make it more simple, and sometimes dialing the music out altogether and getting it really, really quiet is the most effective way to build tension.
The first time I visited EA, I hadn't even written anything yet. They had taken raw takes of strings and brass from the recording session and assigned a couple of very basic states: quiet strings, louder strings and then loud brass. You're standing on a very tall building with a bridge, all smoky and misty, and there's a Necromorph approaching you. As it gets closer, those states ramp up and the music builds, and then the Necromorph doesn't see you and goes the other way. I didn't even know it was my music. I thought they'd used some Penderecki. As far as I know, no one had done that yet, so we were stress-testing it every way we possibly could.
> “It gets so tense that a little floppy stuffed bunny rabbit could jump out like in cartoon form and go, ‘Hi, guys!’ and you would still throw your controller across the room and scream.”
**Jamin Warren: I wanted to ask about texture, and about the physical process. There's so much you can do on computers now, but there is something really wonderful about working with physical objects and live instrumentation. Jason, talk about the Rig, the metal sculpture for _Still Wakes the Deep_.**
**Jason Graves:** I was working on a game that takes place on an oil rig in the late '70s. Of course I think late '70s, I need to buy a Moog, which I did. And I contacted Matt, the sculptor who had built me a sculpture for Tomb Raider about 15 years ago, and said, I need another sculpture, but it doesn't need to be the size of a refrigerator. I just want to bow it and rub a Super Ball on it and tap it. He built this. It looks just like the oil rig from the game, but it's got a spring, it's got holes so you can fill it with water, and all the rods are different pitches. It makes all kinds of wonderfully horrible sounds. That's probably two-thirds of the game.
I also recorded a lot at 192 kHz. You drop it twice as low and you're uncovering frequencies we can't hear with the human ear. Me just tapping that spring, dropped two octaves, sounded like someone screaming through a distortion pedal into a giant metal room. When I get asked, "What's that sound?" I know before I even see what they're talking about. It's the Rig.
**Ryan Holladay:** It's so cool, because nobody else has those sounds. We learned on _Weapons_ to record at very high quality, because you never know when something's going to sound way better slowed down. It reveals all of these hidden undertones, the beauty or terror within these sounds.
killscreen.com
