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An eerie shadow moves across the hallway behind a character, or maybe the Not Quite Dead villain's eyes suddenly snap open. Whatever the case, it's a quiet event that's supposed to be shocking, and if the visual cue doesn't spook the audience, then the obligatory Scare Chord will do the trick.
A cousin to the Sting, the scare chord is a sudden, sharp sforzando of noise (musically based or not) intended to make viewers jump clean out of their seats. The thing that separates it from a Cat Scare is the fact that nothing onscreen causes the noise; it's added into the soundtrack as a way to guarantee the desired reaction. They are often preceded by a deliberate lull in the action of a scene or the music of a soundtrack.
Oh yeah; most people absolutely hate them, especially when they show up unexpectedly outside a horror film and make most viewers want to shout back: "Dammit, movie; don't do that!"
Compare and contrast Last Note Nightmare. Often part of the Screamer Trailer.
Examples
Anime
Commercials
- Played For Laughs in that series of "scary" Verizon ads (i.e., "Towels are kinda scratchy!").
Film
- Go ahead, pick any slasher movie. Psycho is probably the best-known example.
- Duh-Dun...Duh-dun...Duh-dun...
- Cult Classic The Day The Earth Stood Still had lots of these, although it sounded more like the piano was being dropped off a building.
- The first Spider-Man movie had a scene where Norman Osborn has a quick, half-second flashback to his transformation into the Green Goblin, accompanied by a jarring and extremely loud scare chord.
- Unsurprisingly, the musical Sweeney Todd contains any number of these in its Stephen Sondheim score; most egregious are the ear-piercing factory whistles used to punctuate various dramatic moments (and make this editor jump out of her skin when listening to the cast album on headphones).
- No kidding. Those parts with headphones make this troper want to shout, "aaarrrgh!".
- The movie dropped those, but left in the overpowering Scare Chord when the Beggar Woman is wandering in the shop - and Sweeney suddenly appears in the doorway, silhouetted.
- Even louder, in the Final Sequence, when Sweeney killls the Judge.
- Stephen Sondheim was conscious of this trope, and wrote what amounted to miniature scare chords into the Overture and main theme of the score. They were tiny crescendos every two measures. The audience automatically expected something to happen during these crescendos, and the fact that nothing happened added to the suspense already present. The movie, unfortunately, cut out a great deal of the overture, but still used some of Sondheim's tricks.
- Like everything else, taken completely unseriously by Monty Python's Flying Circus, as in the Knights Who Say Ni scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
Knight Who Says Ni: We demand...a shrubbery!
(Cue a very loud, screeching chord.)
- David Lynch loves these. See for example the first appearance of BOB in Twin Peaks, the hobo/monster behind the Winkie's dumpster in Mulholland Drive, or their extremely frequent use in Inland Empire.
- The M. Night Shyamalan films The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water are rife with these. I'm sensing a pattern.
- Shortly after the car accident in The Orphanage.
- The "Corpse Chords" that accompany a slam-cut glance at any of Samara's victims in the US remake of The Ring.
- The remake of The Amityville Horror had so many of these that, if you replaced them with a bass drum, you could use the film's soundtrack as the beat to a piece of house/techno music.
- Scare chords are used in Serenity, both during River's Stealth Hi Bye moment at the beginning and when the Reavers attack.
- There are a whole bunch of these in Kubrick's The Shining.
- Night Of The Living Dead - the one that comes when the power goes out toward the end gets this Troper's vote as the Scariest Chord of Them All.
- Saw does this a lot. The first movie has an especially obnoxious one when Adam looks at the photo of Lawrence's family held hostage.
- In Exorcist III there is a scene that, I think, was made just for this. It is a longshot down a hall in an asylum. Nothing special is going on, the night guard is getting off his shift and a nurse is delivering medicine. As the nurse turns down a hall, the camera suddenly jumps to here end of the hall, and that is when somebody wrapped in white linen and wielding a large knife and a "scare chord symphony" comes from the other side of the hall with the blade raised high. After a mili-second of that, the scene finishs on a shot of a clean white headless Jesus statue.
- Saving Private Ryan used this by having a man shot by a sniper fall on a piano. Despite the tragedy of the scene, it was still rather goofy.
- Sure, it's a blatant ripoff of Carrie, and sure, probably everyone in the theater knows it's coming. But combined with some really excellent timing, the scare cord as the Inferi hand grab's Harry's in the Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince movie is going to make the entire theater jump a foot in the air.
- It doesn't help that they draaaag the scene out, feinting at least three times, before it actually happens.
- Every time James Bond hits the tarantula with his gun in Dr. No, there's a scare chord. The first time it just seems a little cheesy, but after that the scene starts to be funny.
- Drag Me To Hell uses this to a ridiculous degree. Even a drifting handkerchief that suddenly lands on a car's windshield makes a VERY LOUD Scare Chord. The people in the last row of the theater probably died of laughter after seeing everyone jump out of their seats during the séance scene when a demon's head suddenly zooms at the audience SCREAMING with a fire background..
- I Am Legend does a similar thing with SFX: Will Smith discussing Bob Marley. Then a nasty window-closing sound comes in, 1 to 3 seconds before the window is shown. And it's just before a tense sequence (his house being invaded).
- Used frequently in Aliens, most effectively in the scene when Hicks pokes his head up into the ceiling, and sees several aliens crawling upside-down towards him.
- Used at one point in Planet Terror, where it sounds like someone mashing low notes on an old synthesizer.
- After a long uneasy build-up, John Williams utilizes one of these to underscore the first sight of one of the aliens in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Live Action TV
- Nobody expects the jarring chord of the Spanish Inquisition! Its chief weapon is surprise; surprise and loudness!... Loudness and surprise, two weapons; its two weapons are loudness, and surprise, and its shock value... Its three weapons, are loudness, and surprise, and shock value, and being a Subverted Trope due to the harmlessness of the inquisition... Damn. Amongst its weapons... It's not very scary any more, is it?
- Lost uses this from time to time, although the preceding (both short-term and long-term!) suspense is more unbearable, naturally. One example is in the season 4 premier episode "The Beginning of the End", while Hurley is peeping into a cabin window: an EYE closeup abruptly comes into view.
- Parodied in an episode of Family Matters where Carl had a dream in the style of an old Western movie. After each Scare Chord, everybody in the saloon looked around to try and find where the chord came from.
Steve Urkel: Let's form a posse and track down that dang orchestra!
- Also parodied in an episode of Roseanne where the Connors were dealing with taxes and the IRS. A Scare Chord sounded every time someone said the word "audit", prompting everyone to look for the source of the chord.
- In the Star Trek original series episode "Court Martial", the prosecuting attorney badgers Mc Coy into admitting, "Yes, it's possible" — whereupon we get one of the series's trademark overly-dramatic musical stings.
- SonnyWithAChance uses the scare chord twice in one episode. The first time, it was Zora playing it on a violin to scare Tawni and Sonny. The second time it happens, Sonny tells Zora to stop it, only to reveal that it wasn't Zora. Tawni and Sonny look around the room in confusion and fright.
Music
- This troper knows a song (but does not know the name) that starts with beautiful symphonic noises companied with birds singing and a man's voice saying things such as 'Wake up sleepy head..." for the first minute and a half of the song. Then it turns in this horribly loud screamo song that's basic purpose was to scare the crap out people.
- Franz Joseph's Haydn's aptly-named "Surprise Symphony". During his lifetime, his music was mostly employed as background music at parties, which apparently bothered him. It's like having Papa Haydn burst out of thin air and scream "FUCK YOU, AUDIENCE!"
- This editor can attest that the eponymous surprise is as effective on sleeping members of the audience. Talk of jumping out of one's skin —
- The Firebird Suite also does a pretty impressive leap in volume when transitioning to the main portion of the piece.
- That's hardly scary compared to some passages the suites don't use, such as "Magic Carillon" and "Kastchei's Death."
- Watch out for how Fantasia/2000 took advantage of it!
- The Beatles used this several times:
- The opening chord to the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" can be shocking to those who aren't expecting it.
- Cirque du Soleil's LOVE takes full advantage of this in its opening sequence, thanks to Sir George and Giles Martin's clever remixing: after the opening procession set to "Because", the famous last chord of "A Day in the Life" is played backwards, which means it gets louder and louder (and the theatre gets darker), and then...BAM. All they need is that chord, and then it's off to "Get Back"...
- The Beatles' album Abbey Road "finishes" with the gentle fade-out of strings that concludes the song "The End". Approximately fourteen seconds later, the short hidden track "Her Majesty" jumps in with a loud chord (originally the final note of "Mean Mr Mustard") which is out of place with the rest of the song.
- Also on Abbey Road, the song "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" concludes with the precise opposite of a scare chord - an abrupt silence in the middle of a bar, after a long period of hypnotic repetition. This troper found the sudden absence of sound to be just as startling.
- Then there's the gibberish chopped-up/reversed speech of the Sergeant Pepper inner groove...
- The video "Sweetness" by Fischerspooner adds several random scare chords that weren't in the original song. And This Troper means random.
- Halloween by Aqua, since the song is sort of a homage to old horror films.
- You Don't Love Me Anymore, by Weird Al, does a variant of this. After the song, the track continues for a good ten minutes, silently, until a sudden 30-second burst of screaming and what sounds like a chainsaw. Apparently this was supposed to scare people that left the CD playing.
- Julee Cruise's "Into The Night" is a languidly paced haunting ballad (as used to eerie effect in Twin Peaks) - then about 3 and a half minutes in, there's a slowly rising backwards cymbal, followed by 5 rapidly played ominous notes that are much louder and more high pitched than the rest of the song. Not quite a Last Note Nightmare though, as the song then goes on for another minute or so as though nothing ever happened.
- The ending of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (the original 1973 mix or the 2009 5.1 remix, but not the 1976 remix on Boxed) does this; the "caveman" passage segués into a very quiet and soothing guitar/organ segment — and then suddenly, without warning, the Sailors' Hornpipe drastically ups both the tempo and the volume. When this troper first heard Part 2, the penultimate segment lulled him into dozing off — and being abruptly reawoken by that bloody Hornpipe.
- This troper was more startled by the point 13 and a half minutes into Part 1, where a long, mellow Hawaiian-guitar-like sequence is interrupted by a horrible, raspy guitar. And, of course, the sinister voice of Vivian Stanshall appearing out of nowhere to speak the words "Grand piano" after 20 minutes of pure instrumental.
- Oldfield's later work Amarok is absolutely full of these, including a section where some light African chanting is punctuated by scare chord stabs and a sampled voice saying "Happy?" in increasingly processed and chopped-up ways. Supposedly, his falling out with Virgin Records prompted him to produce an album that Virgin couldn't possibly lift a 3-minute single from, as every theme in the piece would inevitably move on faster than this, or be subjected to these bizarre interruptions.
- The Doors' 18 minute odyssey Celebration of the Lizard has Jim yell "WAKE UP!!!" after a few silent seconds somewhere in the second or third minute.
- The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" does this with a gong at the end.
- There's a pretty dissonant scare chord at the beginning of Depeche Mode's "Love In Itself."
- Pink Floyd's "Sysyphus", from their album Ummagumma; eerily calm ambient music, accompanied by the sound of a babbling brook, then suddenly DUNNNNNNNNN!!! Then back to ambience, as you go change your underwear.
- Coheed and Cambria pull this one a number of times throughout their albums, most notably at the end "Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow)" — the sound of rain and a vaguely creepy piano are punctuated by sobbing and an absolutely terrifying scream.
- The beginning synth-organ chord to Def Leppard's "Rock! Rock! Till You Drop", from Pyromania, can be startling.
Video Games
- The original Alone In The Dark trilogy used a classic string tritone hit to good effect.
- Tomb Raider III makes frequent use of these, and they're extremely effective. The Expansion Pack, Tomb Raider: The Lost Artifact, actually uses the scare chord at one point for no reason at all. Damnit!
- The obscure Sega Dreamcast game Illbleed had every single trap, even the deactivated ones, prefaced by a classic scare chord. The upside to this is that people who've played this game tend not to jump nearly as high whenever a movie tries to pull one on them.
- *Violin screech* (+30 Adreneline) "Cool!"
- Being spotted in the Metal Gear Solid games results in an iconic sound best described as '!'. Here's
 the clip.
- Likewise, being seen in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell also triggers a sudden Scare Chord. The first level from the first game, for example, uses a strong, sudden piano note.
- Resident Evil 3 first signals the approach of the Implacable Man Nemesis with a piece composed of low tritone string chords, then when he enters the room, the music elevates to a scare chord crescendo. Nightmare Fuel, along with his demonic growl of "STARS", which you sometimes hear before he enters.
- Resident Evil 2 had at least two scare themes in the various scenes where zombies broke in through the windows or doors. There was also a big choral scare chord played at the beginning of the Final Boss battle of each scenario, especially disturbing with the One Winged Angel forms William has taken on.
- Another scare chord was played during the appearances of Mr. X in the second scenario.
- A secondary character hands the player a key before locking himself into another room. Finding a way into that other room triggers a cutscene with the above-mentioned scare theme playing as he slowly transforms into a zombie.
- Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Carbon play a Scare Chord to a camera pan every time you're spotted by a squad car.
- Gears Of War does this in the PC version when a wretch runs past a door, and it's a very loud one too.
- The Xbox 360 version does this, too. Several times. Whether it's finding people on meat hooks in the prison, seeing a wretch, or kicking open a door only to have a handful of krill escape into the night, they really like to use this...
- The first Silent Hill has a Scare Leitmotif, heard in the first encounter with an Air Screamer and in the scene where you have to save Dr. Kauffman from a Romper. Not to mention the sequence of organ/string scare chords played during the Nightmare Fuel Unleaded dead-end alley sequence at the beginning.
- X-COM: Terror From The Deep had quiet, eerie temsion music that suited its deepsea enviroment, until DAH!DAH! Agh! [Panicked search for aliens who are still hidden.] These scares had nothing to do with events; they just jerked you out of your seat.
- The first time you get a good, up close look at a Hunter in Half Life 2 Episode 2 you know, where you turn around AND IT'S WATCHING YOU THROUGH THE WINDOW NEXT TO YOU! a scare chord goes off. It's actually the Hunter bellowing a war-cry of sorts, but it's to the same effect. To make things worse, it then guts the Love Interest in front of you and buries you under rubble. Hunters = best enemy ever.
- In Episode One, in the first of the tunnel sections with several Zombines with them, a loud, grating chord is played which sounds just like distorted Combine "death beeps"... it's actually a context-activated piece of music, like all the others in Half Life 2, but just as effective.
- Star Trek: Elite Force 2 is riddled with these, every time an enemy comes at you, or you die by, well, anything.
- The song "Devils... Monsters..." from the Halo: Combat Evolved soundtrack, aka the Flood theme, seems to be made up entirely of scare chords.
- Two more scarechord and Psycho Strings based pieces, also associated with terror or the Flood are "Shadows"(prominently heard at the beginning of Two Betrayals when Cortana tells MC about what Halo really does) and "Ancient Machine".
- Then there's that sound that sounds like a rusty metal trapdoor that appears in several soundtrack pieces, eg "Shudder" and "Guilt and Punishment".
- During the cutscene right before encountering the Flood, a scare chord is played when MC opens the door and a Peek A Boo Corpse falls out. It is heard on the OST in "Lament for Pvt. Jenkins".
- Several tracks from the Ever Quest II sountrack, such as Nektulos Forest, seem almost entirely composed of scare chords or rapid string notes. A scare chord which signaled a player character had broken from combat and is attempting to flee has been removed.
- So you're playing Bio Shock, and you've just beaten the second boss. The game has changed level, and you're happily walking down a narrow pathway with no enemies in sight. With no warning whatsoever, you have a very sudden vision of three pictures with a Scare Chord (in this case a scream) along with it. Managed not to jump up and yelp like a little girl? No? You're not alone.
- F.E.A.R. makes heavy use of the Scare Chord in conjunction with sudden appearances by Alma or Replica attacks.
- On the level with the automated gun turrets, a certain scare chord plays when a turret activates.
- Whenever Zant in The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess appears, a Scare Chord that sounds a bit like an unearthly scream plays.
- How can you mention Zelda without mentioning the Re Dead? You're wandering around in a dark temple, or below a scary well or tomb, minding your own innocent business...then suddenly, a terrifying mutilated scream sounds and before you can even spin around to see the source, BOOM, you're frozen in the paralyzing fear as the Re Dead shambles toward you...
- In Resident Evil 4, in the kitchen section of the last chapter, the music is silent for several seconds before a disquieting piano chord.
- The NES adaptation of Friday The 13th plays a scare chord whenever Jason appears, or when he kills one of the children. This was real Nightmare Fuel when I was a kid.
- The Commodore 64 game is even worse, with the scare chord being a blood-curdling scream combined with a scary image, such as an axe in someone's head. These come up whenever someone is killed. It doesn't help that the music playing the rest of the time is calming nursery rhyme music.
- Dead Space practically runs off this trope. It's both used straight and played with - At times, you'll hear what sounds like a scare chord, bring up your weapon and frantically look around the room for something to shoot, only to find that the noise was made by something completely harmless, like a sprinkler system starting up. Other times, you hear one right before you get your head clawed off, so... Yeah.
- I can't believe no-one's said the SA-X from Metroid Fusion yet. Especially that first scene.
- Or anytime the SA-X shows up. Scare Footsteps, more like.
- Possibly accidentally averted in 7th Guest, which had a music track for one of the puzzles (a maze) that was eerily silent, then suddenly burst into a brief cachophony of almost-random piano notes. It scared this troper greatly as a pre-teen, until he discovered that the burst of notes had nothing to do with events in the game; The entire song was simply the playback of an audio track on the CD.
- Well, actually, only the title and credits use Red Book audio; the rest is played through the configured music device. Most, if not all, of the music does exist in Red Book form, but it's on the second disc, while the vast majority of the game uses the first disc.
- One of these, appropriately titled "Shock", shows up in Super Mario RPG, when Mallow finds out he isn't a tadpole.
- At times in Condemned 2: Bloodshot, fights will be accompanied by a scare chord every time you or an enemy takes a hit or blocks, along with a long violin screech when an enemy dies. This happens only in certain fights, but the enemies are not at all different from the others.
- No one mentions Oregon Trail II? DUN DUN!!!!
- There's another one besides the infamous DUN DUN, the odd horn whenever a nastier thing such as cholera or an infection occurs.
- A later version (I assume; it's been forever) had different banjo riffs associated with different events. The one for your axle breaking sounded like someone had ripped the strings right off the banjo, and it made this troper jump out of her skin every single time. She also became more paranoid of it the further she got into a game without breaking an axle.
- Left 4 Dead is chockful of musical cues, some subtle and some not, depending on what enemies are nearby or attacking your friends. Or you.
- La Mulana plays one if you trigger a trap.
- Mewtwo and Arceus both have fairly unnerving cries in the otherwise (fairly) innocent Pokemon games. Arceus compounds this by having a musical theme consisting almost entirely of drums and shrill trumpets.
- Resistance sometimes does this in the middle of perfectly peaceful places, just to keep you on your toes.
- Clock Tower: The First Fear does this every time Bobby attacks, as well as a few other scenes. It's especially effective because their is NO music when he isn't there.
- The scraping, shrieking noise that Husk spikes make in Mass Effect. Worse, the newly spawned Husk will usually charge straight at you, gibbering and screaming the whole way.
- When Kazuya Mishima is holding his grandfather, reminiscing about the old times when he used to train with him, it seems like a sweet scene. The musical cue that accompanies his evil smile and glowing red eye just before he kills Jinpachi is the classic stinger chord and interrupts this out of nowhere. The way the scene is set up lends itself to this, as when Kazuya picks up Jinpachi, he's facing the right side, thus his left eye (the one that glows) is unseen. When he smirks, the viewer is given an full-on headshot, and then as he looks over his shoulder afterward, his evil eye is the only one visible.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind does this to a lesser extend, the ambient background music will change from "exploration" themes to a random "battle" theme once the wandering player is attacked. The exploration themes are typically quite and soothing while various battle themes will start with a loud drumbeat or trumpet blast. This can be quite surprising and startling when the player is already fairly tense, or concentrated on something else.
- In the horror The Suffering, in addition to scripted scares, you get sudden, short and completely random flashes of scary images accompanied by a high-pitched scare chord. It happens frequently in the later parts of the game. The result is that you are afraid even if you are backtracking or just standing on a spot with your character.
- Turok 2: The Mantid Hive music has a lot of scare chords in it.
- In the original Rainbow Six, various scare chords are played when your team opens a door, heightening the suspense with you not knowing what's behind the door.
- The original sound novels of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni use these occasionally, and get some bonus points for actually making the damn things scary rather than just startling.
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni does this even better. Especially when a sentence stops midway for a second, and when the shocking part is said, SCARE CHORD! If the text itself isn't enough to make you go 'oh shit', then the scare chord is the push that WILL make you go 'oh shit!'
- The Sims has a Scare Chord whenever something bad shows up, usually a robber but also for things like a raccoon showing up.
- This Troper has to leave the room whenever she gets robbed.
- Even worse is when the sound appears to play for no apparent reason. No raccoon, no burglar, nothing. You frantically pan around a darkened house where everyone is asleep, and nothing is out of place. This Troper finds it to be that much worse.
- Fatal Frame is full of these. From the sounds of doors opening, to tinkling bells, to a koto string snapping as you approach a previously locked door.
- In the incredibly obscure Edutainment game Dr. Healthenstein's Body Fun, there are
three two instances where the character you play will visit the Imp's cave. He represents all the bad habits one can have as far as drug use (smoking, drinking and dope), and to avoid having your character lose points on their health scale you have to answer a question that is usually about "what do you do if so-and-so happens", where only the best answer counts. Get a question right and you get a soft "ta-daaa!" sound while your character avoids actually doing whatever bad habit was thrown at you. Get it wrong, and you not only hear the loud sound of someone slamming two handfuls of keys on an organ blaring in your ears, but it's also followed by the creepiest gif image of the imp overlapping the number choice you picked popping up suddenly that will give ten year olds a good freak-out, which is exactly the age group the game was aimed for. Since the game is aimed for kids, the questions are fairly easy and older players or ones equally good at knowing what kids are expected to do in these scenarios can very well go through the game without ever hearing the dreaded organs. However, there is one particular question where your answer may be right to you but wrong to the game. Hmm... So my parents might be getting a divorce. Should I try to see how I can solve this the calmest way possible or just sit it out, "accept" the problem and act as if it is never there or it will never change no matter what I do? According to the game, you have to accept it and do nothing.
Western Animation
Literature
Comics
- Klarion the Witch Boy briefly added one in his name ("Klarion... bum bum BUM... the Witch Boy!"), and insisted that others addressing him use it as well. Since they were basically saying "bum bum BUM" (presumably with tonal changes) it didn't really do much for him.
Web Comics
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