Top 14 Quotes by Christopher Young

People who work in horror know they are contributing to a genre that has always been loved and will always be loved - privately. It's the forbidden evil working behind the curtain. My job scoring a horror movie is like being the barker at a carnival. A good barker can get anyone to walk into the roped-off tent.

Horror films are the ones that pay the bills, and historically, they have shown that they are good investments. They helped Universal survive with that initial splash of horror films in the 1930s and '40s. And horror films kept New Line alive with the 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' series.

I don't care how inventive you are; once you introduce strings into the ensemble for a horror film, you're entering into a world where a tradition has been thoroughly established. So it's repeated use over the years is like, 'Oh God, another film with strings, another spooky movie with strings.'

I don't think when I started off that I was expecting to become so specialized, but what happened is that when my career started, I didn't pick my first film. I was picked to do it, and it happened to be a horror film.

'Psycho' is probably the best known example of a horror film whose exclusive sound was strings, and since then, it's been hard to avoid that. The minute you have strings as your primary voice, the comparisons are always made.

In horror movies, you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie, all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated.