Soundtrack Dissonance / Film

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Films — Animated

• At the end of Alma, cheerful music plays as the camera pans over Alma, now transformed into a doll, and the many, many other dolls housing the souls of trapped children, all moving their eyes back and forth in terror.
• Animal Soccer World: Ominous jungle music is played over the entire movie, even in scenes where it's very unfitting.
• Worthless from The Brave Little Toaster is an incredibly catchy song, and easily the most upbeat-sounding and lively of all of the songs in the entire movie. Its lyrics however are incredibly dark, being incredibly sad and depressing, and featuring themes of mental illness and even suicide. And those singing the song are junkyard cars telling their story before being fatally crushed by Crusher, one of whom is quite literally Driven to Suicide (heh) when he drives onto the conveyorbelt to be killed before Giant Magnet can pick him up, and the song ends with the remains of said vehicle landing on the main characters and making it pretty clear this is their Darkest Hour. Let's listen!
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America boasts a soundtrack that sounds like it takes itself very seriously, with all the background music sounding like it was meant for a genuine action thriller. It of course only makes the already ridiculous events happening onscreen all the more hilarious.
• Camelot has an upbeat music score during the final battle, where almost all the Knights of the Round Table die.
• Norwegian black comedy Svidd Neger was scored by Norwegian ambient/electro band Ulver, with a majority of the film featuring melancholic or dramatic orchestral tracks completely at odds with the drunken shenanigans and slapstick comedy onscreen. Reversed in a flashback where Karl beats and drowns his wife after discovering she had cheated on him, set to a lilting Hawaiian ditty. Avoided toward the end when we see Anna nursing her newborn twins while hiding in the woods in a rainstorm, shivering and seeming on the verge of tears while she sings a lullaby about someday escaping her family and travelling to America with her lover Norman.
• Spark Plug Entertainment's A Car's Life: Sparky's Big Adventure has the silly MIDI music that plays when Norbert the gas pump gets set on fire.
• Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget: During the climactic battle, the song "Summer Holiday" by by Cliff Richard plays as the Fun Land Farms chickens begin marching to their deaths, with Molly, the rats, and the other chickens desperately trying to stop them.
• The Great Mouse Detective :
  • The movie opens with Olivia's father getting violently kidnapped in front of his daughter, and there are a few moments of silence as she cries out for him after he's gone. Cue the opening credits with confoundingly upbeat music.
  • There's also an in-universe example: When Ratigan leaves the heroes to die in a Death Trap, the device is connected to a phonograph record that plays "Goodbye So Soon" — a sentimental music hall number that he recorded for just this situation.
• In Home (2015), the song "Red Balloon" by Charli XCX plays during the Boov invasion of Earth, which sees all of humanity abducted and displaced from their homes while the aliens overrun the cities. Then again, from the Boov perspective it's quite fitting since it's quite a peppy and fun song (and the sequence does involve a lot of things floating up like balloons).
• "Be Prepared" in Hoodwinked! has to count. Especially once the avalanche starts during the mine cart sequence. When the slide starts to chase Red and Japeth's mine cart, here's Japeth's lyrics:
  Japeth: [singing] Ohhhhhhh, an avalanche is coming and I do not feel prepared / It's running like a mountain lion, I must say that I'm scared / and if not for the witch's spell you'd hear just how I scream / But since I'm only singing I'll just yodel 'til we're creamed.
  • Mood Whiplash ensues, for as Japeth yodels while the cart enters the next tunnel, Red is reacting accordingly to the fact that the cart is speeding towards a dead-end. As Japeth hits the last note of the song, she screams as the cart goes off the rails.
  • The Lyrical Dissonance when Boingo does his Villain Song "Top of the Woods".
• The song "A Guy Like You" (a cheerful, optimistic song sung by the gargoyles) from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's sung during the scene when medieval Paris is literally burned to the ground by the villain as an attempt to force the heroine out of her hiding spot.
• In Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, after the penguins begin stealing vans to rebuild their plane, they manage to run over Nana, an old woman. After realizing she's still alive, they turn on the music and proceed to hit her again while Boston's "More Than a Feeling" blasts from the speakers. Subverted in that the scene is Played for Laughs, since Nana's indestructible.
  • Played straight when they play Barry Manilow's "Copacabana" as they break the dam.
• In Mary and Max, an eerie cover of "Que Sera Sera" plays while Mary is about to commit suicide.
• The scene in 9 where, after a heartwarming sequence in which "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" plays and the characters are all relaxed and having fun, it takes a disturbing twist when The Big Bad pulls a Disney Death and proceeds to chase an unlucky 5 across the field. The only sounds to be heard are 5's frantic screams for the others to run, and Somewhere Over The Rainbow still playing eerily in the background. This terrifying moment is emphasised by the lyrics being sung as we see 5 running toward the screen in desperate escape, the machine not far behind: If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, then why, oh why, can't I?
• The wrist-slittingly sad animated film The Plague Dogs, by the makers of Watership Down, set the even sadder ending to the song "Time and Tide", a cheerful, Cat Stevens-esque gospel song about dying. "I don't feel! No pain no more!"
• Quest for Camelot overlays a seriously weird chase scene with the soft, loving voice of Céline Dion singing "The Prayer".
• In the final, heartbreaking scene The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the celestial beings who have come to take the protagonist away and erase her memories of her family and her life on Earth are accompanied by joyous festival music. Justified in that they come from a place where there is no suffering or sorrow, so they don't understand that what they are doing is painful.
• The soundtrack of Transformers: The Movie borders on this trope from time to time, most notably with "Weird" Al Yankovic's "Dare To Be Stupid" playing during the Autobot vs. Junkion battle scene.
• In Turning Red, the Cha Cha Slide plays during Tyler's birthday party but no one is dancing to it.
• WALL•E. We hear the uplifting Hello, Dolly! tune "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" while being subjected to depressing, horrifying images of the earth drowning in trash. This contrast is made even more intense by the first images during the song being beautiful starscapes and whirling galaxies.
  "Out there... there's an outside filled with wonder..."
• Waltz with Bashir makes extensive use of this trope.

Films — Live-Action

• Airplane! has a Crosses the Line Twice use of this trope in a Black Comedy scene where the stewardess, Randy, plays "River of Jordan" to cheer up the Littlest Cancer Patient, accidentally knocks out her IV with a careless swing of the guitar, and keeps singing the song to the delight of the other passengers, oblivious to the girl's mother desperately trying to revive her.
• Alien: Covenant sets the gruesome death of Captain Oram to a heartwarming piece in a way that's intended to reflect the madness of the individual who caused it.
• The final scenes of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz all involve wildly dissonant music, ranging from "Bye Bye Love" (performed while Joe Gideon's heart finally gives out) to "There's No Business Like Show Business" (which kicks in when Gideon is zipped into a body bag).
• In All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, the radio in Chloe's car plays bouncy Latin pop music as Emmet chases down Chloe with it.
• The sex scene in Alone in the Dark (2005) has a song about slavery and torture in Africa as background. This may be more of a case of Isn't It Ironic?, though.
• In American Psycho, Serial Killer Patrick Bateman commits an axe murder to the tune of "Hip to be Square" while commenting on the appropriateness of the music to '80s culture.
  • In the novel, he's humming a tune of a TV show that he watched as a child (he can't remember what it was), while making a sausage out of the body of a woman he just killed.
  • A (fan-made?) trailer that can be found on YouTube for American Psycho uses The Beach Boys' optimistic song Wouldn't It Be Nice (a song about two young lovers wanting to get married) to some pretty brutal and bloody clips.
• An American Werewolf in London has notable upbeat music throughout, especially the climax, which ends somberly with the main character dead and his love crying over his dead body, then immediately jumpcuts into the credits with the ultra upbeat, bouncy version of Blue Moon by The Marcels.
  • And who could forget: "Blue Moon, You Saw Me Standing Alone—" "JESUS CHRIST!!!"
• At John Landis' request, Elmer Bernstein scored Animal House as a drama — which made it even funnier.
• Apt Pupil ends with the song "Das Ist Berlin", which is a happy and uplifting song, but in context is really creepy.
• A rare case of a dissonance with sadder music is the film Asterix & Obelix Take on Caesar which is a lighthearted comedy about a Gallic village bravel opposing Roman soldiers with the help of a magic drink. While it does contain a subplot about Obelix's Unrequited Love to Fallballa, a local beauty, this is Played for Laughs and he quickly come over it. The title song, however, is fully about this. The name — "She simply doesn't see me" — says it all.
  Even borders guarded by millions of soldiers can be breached,
  But the barrier between her and me cannot...
• Atomic Blonde uses this to great effect:
  • When Lorraine is ambushed by the KGB while sitting in the backseat of their car, she uses her heel to successfully fight her way through them, all while the original German song 'Major Tom' by Peter Schilling plays.
  • In one scene, Bremovych has rounded up a group of German vandals (mainly teens). As an example he kicks the shit out of one of them, a skateboarder, while '99 Luftballoons' plays on a boombox. Lampshaded when he breaks the stereo with his foot.
  • Lorraine fights several agents in an apartment while 'Father Figure' plays on a stereo.
  • 'I Ran (So Far Away)' by the Seagulls plays while a beaten-down Lorraine and her wounded target try escaping the bad guys in a car.
  • 'Voices Carry' by Til Tuesday plays when Percival murders Delphine.
• In the 1978 Italian film Avere vent'anni, a movie which starts off as a light comedy and then ends with the two main female leads being brutally raped and killed, a soundtrack of bright, happy Europop plays during the shocking final scene.
• In the middle of Babe, the Hoggett family can be heard singing a Christmas carol inside the house when they are eating Ferdinand's friend, Rosanna for the Christmas dinner.
• 1992's biodrama The Babe, starring John Goodman as the eponymous baseball player Babe Ruth, ends in a Foregone Conclusion that nonetheless delivers this. As the movie ends on a triumphant, but bittersweet note for the character, a closing narrative is given with music even more triumphant as it informs us that not only was the Babe never allowed to manage in professional baseball as he dreamed to, he died of throat cancer on August 16, 1948.
• In Back to the Future, the use of "Mr. Sandman" by The Four Aces, a cheerful song, during the "Mister Sandman" Sequence, underscores Marty McFly's confusion as he wanders through the 1955 Hill Valley.
• In The Bad Seed (1956), Rhoda sets fire to Leroy's bedding while he sleeps, then goes upstairs and plays "Au Clair de la Lune" on the piano at increasing speed as Leroy screams in agony.
• Done in the first Tim Burton Batman film. When the Joker shoots Boss Grissom, cheerful circus carnival music plays as he hams it up and starts firing his gun like a trigger-happy cowboy while laughing gleefully. It's what effectively redefines him as the Joker, but that moment is obviously a case of Dude, Not Funny! in true Joker fashion. Adding that whimsical circus theme just seethes Black Comedy up the wazoo. It also happens right after Joker gasses out an entire museum to "meet" (kidnap) Vicki Vale undeterred, then bursts onto the scene, with a thug holding a boombox. When he clicks it on, Prince's "Partyman" blares as Joker and his cohorts deface and destroy enough works of art in the museum to make Michelangelo cry a river. The same music from when the Joker murders Grissom also plays during Batman's fight with the last batch of the Joker's goons late in the film.
• Battle Royale. Students killing each other left and right... to the accompaniment of various soothing classical pieces played over a loudspeaker on the island on which they're fighting.
• Baywatch (2017) has the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants play during a fight scene.
• An unusual sort of Soundtrack Dissonance occurs in A Beautiful Mind: in the car chase scene, in which John Nash and his boss are pursued and shot at by two Soviet agents, the musical score avoids an action theme and opts instead for a dark and surprisingly lonely piano theme as the two cars exchange fire. However, the music becomes somewhat more appropriate when Nash is found to be suffering from schizophrenia, and imagined the entire scenario. The music — a particular theme involved specifically with Nash's delusions of Soviet conspiracies — is meant to symbolize his continuing breakdown.
• Due to Crystal-Ball Scheduling with a wild sense of humor, this pops up a few times in Being There. Middle-aged upper-class people being driven in a limo up to the Big Fancy House just isn't the same when the music on the TV is the Cheech and Chong song "Basketball Jones". And Shirley MacLaine putting the moves on Peter Sellers may sound odd enough on its own, but then you add Mister Rogers singing about friendship...
• Beverly Hills Cop III: The Wonder World theme continuously plays in the background as Axel is in a firefight with DeWald's mooks, as well as his attempts to use the Annihilator 2000. One of the weapon's add-ons is a radio, which blares "Luv 4 Dem Gangsta'z" by Eazy-E and shuts off when the mooks open fire on him. Then "North Dakota, South Dakota" by Jerry Lewis plays from the radio, and Axel finally gets the hang of the weapon and kills the mooks. Then back to the Wonder World theme. A little later on, after "Wild Bill" Rosewood is shot down, Flint arrives at the trashed park and is soon shot at from above by a mook before he manages to waste him, all while the Wonder World song continues to blare in the background. Flint is more than a little freaked out.
  Flint: Turn that fucking song off!
• Bill Cosby's 1983 concert film Bill Cosby: Himself originally opened with him singing a parody of Grover Washington Jr.'s "Just the Two of Us" titled "Just the Slew of Us", which does not fit this trope. However, the VHS release swaps it out for a slow, somber ballad called "It Was a Good Idea at the Time", which does fit this trope to a tee.
• The original trailer for Blade Runner featured prominent use of "If I Didn't Care" by The Ink Spots. The song quite blatantly clashes with the imagery.
• The original The Blob (1958) treats the premise of a flesh-eating mass of protoplasm from space in deadly earnest, but the title tune is a happy, jaunty, cha-cha-tinged number (by a young Burt Bacharach).
• Blood Debts, a Direct to Video movie about a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, ends with a happy, uplifting tune once the Big Bad is blown up, over the words "mark collins, age 45, gave himself up to the authorities after the incident. he is now serving a life sentence." (complete with the lack of capitalization). Followed with the credits.
• The finale of the crazy chase at the end of The Blues Brothers is when Jake and Elwood get on a lift to reach the office where they have to deliver the check for the orphanage's back taxes. Scenes where the frenzied pursuers storm the building are then counterpointed with shots of the Blues Brothers silently standing in the lift as "The Girl from Ipanema" plays in a corny, soothing muzak version.
• In The Boat That Rocked / Pirate Radio, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys plays as the boat starts to sink, and the crew rush to get out in time.
• Brazil's main Leitmotif, the bossa nova song "Brazil", is a happy tune in a movie about a soul crushing, bureaucratic, dystopia.
  • Then there's the bombing in the restaurant — the waiter apologizes profusely and pulls up a screen in an ineffective attempt to hide the sight of the carnage, and the musicians start playing "Hava Nagila" over the screams.
• In The Cabin in the Woods there's a big office party with cheerful music playing while the live CCTV footage of the heroine getting savaged by a zombie continues playing in the background.
• In the thriller The Call, a young woman wakes up to find herself locked in the trunk of a car (where her abductor placed her after knocking her out), while the quintessential 80's pop tune "Puttin' On The Ritz" plays on the car stereo. Even creepier, quick cuts of the driver show that he's happily bopping along to the song, looking like a perfectly normal guy and not at all like some psycho who just kidnapped a terrified girl.
• The Butcher Boy: A cheerful tune is played after Francie defecates on the floor of the Nugent's house.
• Director Cameron Crowe does this a lot. Examples include:
  • Almost Famous, in which Stevie Wonder's "Ma Cherie Amour" plays while the protagonist's love interest is having her stomach pumped after a drug overdose.
  • In Vanilla Sky, Todd Rundgren's breakup anthem "Can We Still Be Friends" plays after the main character has killed his lover, or her duplicitous double, or something, and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" booms out awesomely as his mind starts to unravel and he sort of starts to figure out how very wrong he is about everything.
• Cannibal Holocaust uses this and it is terrifying. Probably no movie ever contrasts placid music with horrific imagery like this one. The film's composer Riz Ortolani was really good at employing this method, having previously done so in Mondo Cane and its sequels Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom, where the most outrageous or horrific moments were often accompanied by music that could easily have been the backing track to a contemporary pop ballad (and in the case of the main theme from Mondo Cane, it was).
• In Anthology Film Cat's Eye, the segment "Quitters Inc" has Dr. Vinny Donatti demonstrate a room's electrified floor by throwing a stray cat inside and letting it "dance" to "Twist and Shout". Later on there's a similar scene with a human victim and ? And The Mysterians' lyrically dissonant upbeat breakup song "96 Tears".
• In Bruce Dickinson's and Julian Doyle's Chemical Wedding, we are treated to the sight of Simon Callow as Aleister Crowley striding down a Cambridge University hallway to deliver a lecture while listening to the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. It get weirder from there.
• Citizen Kane is a pretty sad film but don't worry, the end credits should pick you right up.
• David Dobkin's "Clay Pigeons" uses this several times. For example, the Old 97's "Timebomb" plays over the opening credits, right after Joaquin Phoenix's best friend kills himself in front of him. Later in the movie, Elvis Presley's version of "It's Now or Never" play during a murder scene.
• Subverted in Come and See where the music played during the village massacre only adds to the Surreal Horror.
• Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind has a scene of Chuck Barris doing his CIA work... with a hilarious "If I Had a Hammer" rendition in the background.
• Cocaine Bear has the Depeche Mode techno-pop song "Just Can't Get Enough" blasting during the chase scene with the ambulance and the black bear. Double so when the titular ursine does a super leap into the back of the ambulance.
• In Contagion (2011), during the scene where Dr. Mears dies and a researcher is discussing ordering more body bags from Canada, the soundtrack being played is an uplifting track called "Merry Christmas".
• Crimson Tide has a scene with majestic music playing while the U.S.S. Alabama, damaged by a torpedo attack, is in danger of sinking to its doom and three men are drowning in a bilge bay. The Alabama survives; the three men don't.
• Cruella: When a young Estella is chased down by Dalmatians at the start of the film, the music playing in the background is "Inside Looking Out", a 60's rock number by The Animals. It's a much more upbeat song than what you expect to hear in a scene where a little girl is nearly mauled by dogs, and her mother gets killed off.
• Invoked in Dante's Peak, with the group singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" while rowing their boat across an acidic lake in an effort to keep themselves calm despite the dire situation.
• Dark Star ends with the main character performing Dramatic Space Drifting and is about to burn up in atmospheric re-entry, while the only other surviving crewmember is caught in a meteor swarm and is being pushed by it in the other direction. Since the whole film is Black Comedy, the natural soundtrack choice for this scene is the downbeat country number "Benson, Arizona".
• Dawn of the Dead (1978): Subverted in the ending credits. The upbeat muzak seems to clash with zombies wandering aimlessly around a mall, until you realize that they're just stand-ins for human shoppers who'd be doing exactly the same thing.
• The Day After: The opening titles music is a stirring, patriotic-sounding song, at times segueing into a gentle, pastoral melody. The actual movie soon turns into a grim, terrifying, utterly depressing nightmare.
• Eagle Rock over the closing credits for Dead Heart.
• The trailer for the Death Note live-action film has the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California" in the background.
  • Also used for the credits. While the tone seems out of place, the song is about a criminal beloved to the singer who brought on herself her own demise. Kira kills criminals. Lyrically appropriate, at least.
• Deadpool (2016) has a montage of Wade enduring a gauntlet of Gitmo-style Cold-Blooded Torture set to The Chordettes' "Mr. Sandman". Before that the Sex Montage between Wade and Vanessa is set to Neil Sedaka's lite-pop "Calendar Girl", and the opening credits are set to "Angel Of The Morning" by Juice Newton.
• This is taken Up to Eleven in Deadpool 2, with the intro fight scene set to Dolly Parton's 9 To 5 and an group charging into battle to the tune of Steve Miller Band's Fly Like An Eagle.
• The last scenes of Death Note (2017) plays Air Supply's love song The Power of Love as Light calmly explains how he manipulated his girlfriend Mia to fall to her death while throwing the police off his back.
• The Italian horror film Deep Red features gruesome murder scenes with fast-paced jazz tunes playing on the background.
• The dialogue-free 2004 Australian film Defenceless A Blood Symphony features a soundtrack of nothing but classical and new age music to accompany the relentless brutality and savage violence onscreen.
• At the end of The Devil's Rejects, the titular family commit Suicide by Cop to the tune of "Freebird", with the freeze frame of their deaths, as well as all of the gunshots occurring during the upbeat and frenzied solo.
• Die Hard:
  • Die Hard famously uses "Ode to Joy" as the villain's theme song. That song doesn't fare much better than "What a Wonderful World".
  • Michael Kamen had a habit of quoting popular/traditional music. The original movie includes some tense quotes of "Winter Wonderland", while the third references "Daisy Bell" (along with less dissonant, but still noticeable quotes of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and "Go Down Moses").
  • Die Hard 2: While John's sneaking around under the terminal, the Source Music from the janitor's record player is Patti Page's "Old Cape Cod".
  • Both Die Hard 1 and 2 end with the song "Let it Snow" by Vaughn Monroe. In the first Die Hard the song is sung by Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) just before the body of a dead terrorist drops on top of his car. In Die Hard 2 the song compliments the harsh snow storm that plays a part in plot of the film.
• The Saturday Night Live film Dirty Work has one scene set in a bar that plays this for laughs. A bar fight's about to break out. One of the drunks goes straight to the jukebox shouting about how he's going to cue up The Rolling Stones' "Street Fightin' Man" for this very occasion. Unfortunately, he hits the wrong button. Cue a bar fight set to the thumping tones of... "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)".
  Man: "Looks like there's gonna be a brawl. You playin' something good? "
  Chris Farley: "Hell, yeah! Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man! G! 7!"
  Man: "...you just hit G-8."
  Jukebox: "If you like Pina Coladas... and getting caught in the rain..."
• Django Unchained features an In-Universe example. During a closing of the deal, a harpist plays Beethoven. Schultz, who is reminiscing about a slave being torn apart, becomes so agitated he yells at the harpist to stop playing.
• Dog Days (2018) has an in-universe example. Greg is supposed to put together a playlist for Ruth's baby shower, but he doesn't pay attention and accidentally includes background music from Schindler's List, which, as Ruth says later, puts everyone in a weird headspace.
• Dr. Phibes Rises Again ends with the title character, played by Vincent Price, singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" as he wins.
• The scene in Dogma, where Loki murders the Mooby board execs is done while the very upbeat Mooby theme song plays in the background.
• The credits of Dogville. A shockingly violent ending, followed by Young Americans by David Bowie, while showing pictures of the worst-looking slums in the US. Holy crap.
• The trailer for Drive (2011) uses a soft violin melody that begins when the main character kisses his love interest. It continues to play over parts of some of the movie's most violent moments, finally ending when the main character threatens to hammer a bullet through a man's skull.
• Drive Angry: In the second half of the movie, Oklahoma police herd Milton and Piper into a roadblock in order to execute them for their earlier cop-killing. Until the protagonists were about to be shot, music was either non-existent or appropriately grim. Then the Accountant drives in from behind the roadblock in a hydrogen fuel truck, speeding straight towards the cops and driving through their cars to get to them, explosions abounding. What starts playing? "That's The Way I Like It" by KC & the Sunshine Band, on the Accountants' radio, while he bobs his head to the music.
• In the Steven Seagal film Driven to Kill, every time Seagal's character gets into a fight or starts shooting, cheesy Russian folk music starts blaring.
• Elves (2017): One scene has a red-headed woman kill her friends to an upbeat musical rendition of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas".
• Eraserhead: "In heaven, everything is fine. In heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things, and I've got mine..."
• The Evil Dead (1981):
  • The basement scene with the cheerful jazz music and the bleeding lightbulb and slide projector.
  • The end credits also counts too. With the film ending with Ash being attacked by the evil force and him screaming in horror before cutting to black, the end credits has the same jazz music playing over it. After a while, the song begins to 'die' and fade out and is replaced with ominous wind and buzzing flies, almost like the ending has two times the dissonance. That exact same jazz music from The Evil Dead is also used, by way of Shout-Out, at the beginning of the fifth Creepshow segment.
• Ex Machina's soundtrack uses this to great effect. Notably, there's the crazy dance scene between Nathan and Kyoko, which uses an upbeat Disco track while Nathan is essentially commanding his personal slave to dance for him. And at the end of the movie, a beautifully serene orchestral piece plays as Ava brutally murders Nathan and leaves Caleb locked in the lab to die of starvation.
• Extraterrestrial (2014): The Cruel Twist Ending is overlaid with the updeat Christian song "Spirit in the Sky'' sung by Elton John about going to Heaven and being with Jesus.
• John Woo's Face/Off, where the song "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" plays during a silent gunfight.
• Fallen uses "Time Is On My Side" in somewhat the same manner as an Ironic Nursery Tune, first playing as a criminal is to be executed, then sung by the villain as a representation of how he's unstoppable. The hero uses the song himself during a rather clever Out-Gambitted.
• "London Bridge is Falling Down" is a recurring motif in Falling Down, representing the Michael Douglas character's fractured innocence after he goes postal. He even gets a snowglobe that plays the song, and Detective Pendergast sings it to his bipolar wife to calm her down.
• In-Universe in Fat Man & Little Boy (1998). Light upbeat music (Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Reed Flutes' to be specific) plays during the countdown to the first nuclear explosion in history because of interference from a local station on the same radio frequency used by those doing the test.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas opens with file footage of various unpleasant incidents from the '60s while a somber version of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music plays. The off-kilter effect suits a movie about a massive drug trip rather well.
• The end of Fight Club features an example when The Narrator and Marla Singer watch multiple office buildings collapse while the slow paced Pixies song "Where Is My Mind?" plays on the soundtrack.
• In First Man, the unveiling of the iconic Saturn V rocket that would later send Apollo 11 to the moon is juxtaposed with a black activist performing the protest song "Whitey's on the Moon". There really wasn't much fanfare in real life, as the program was coming under fire for its financial (and human) costs and wasn't vindicated until after the moon landing.
• The clock radio which counts down the protagonist's supposed hour in 1408 repeatedly (and autonomously) breaks into The Carpenter's "We've Only Just Begun." This is combined with the countdown resetting itself, and new inventive tortures being pulled by the Genius Loci. The cumulative effect is terrifying.
• Turned all around as early as 1932's Freaks, whose title card is accompanied by some deeply chilling, Circus of Fear type music and stylized, nightmarish images of most of the titular characters. Yet the majority of the film's one-hour run time is spent with them just hanging out, and it's a Sitcom with a mostly-deformed cast... up to the point that the freaks start stalking a woman who married one of their own for money and then tried to murder him. That scene, however, had no music.
• Funny Games starts with a happy family driving through a beautiful country road and listening to opera. When the credits begin, the soundtrack suddenly switches to a shockingly discordant and abrasive song with grinding guitars, piercing trumpets, and meaningless screeching. That song is called "Bonehead" and it's by Naked City.
• Gangster No. 1 features a scene of brutal torture accompanied by the romantic song "Why".
• Gettysburg
  • When Union general John Reynolds arrives to reinforce Buford's cavalry, the pipers are playing a jaunty marching tune.^note a real song called "Hell on the Wabash" The soundtrack picks it up and amplfies it over scenes of soldiers getting shot and shelled.
  • Pickett's Charge begins with the same triumphant theme that attended the bayonet charge on Litter Round Top even though it has been made thoroughly clear that the assault will be a bloodbath for the Confederates. As the doomed march progresses, the soundtrack begins to match the slaughter.
• Enya's "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)" plays during the climactic torture scene in David Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As Source Music, no less!
• Near the end of the battle that opens Gladiator, what had previously been a violent, trumpet-heavy piece of music gives way to the dulcet tones of Lisa Gerrard singing wordlessly. People are still being slaughtered out there even as she sings, but the changing tone of the soundtrack gives it a completely different flavor.
• Godzilla:
  • The Japanese version of The Return of Godzilla features a pop song over the ending credits.
  • Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla: Mechagodzilla rips Anguirus's jaw in an intense and dramatic scene. The music playing in the background is snazzy jazz music.
  • Played for Laughs in Godzilla (2014) — when the female MUTO tears through Las Vegas, Elvis Presley's "Devil In Disguise" plays inside a building as a group of people Late to the Tragedy get a good look at the debris of the monster's rampage.
• Invoked in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. While Tuco is being tortured by Angel Eyes, a beautiful song plays. It's actually being played by the soldiers on their instruments outside, and they are apparently ordered to play whenever Angel Eyes decides to torture someone. His habit is to beat them until the song is over.
• In Goodfellas, the brutal, gory beating of Billy Batts is accompanied by the strains of Donovan's romantic, hippie-fied psychedelic pop-folk song "Atlantis," which is playing on the jukebox at the time. Not the only example in the movie, as soundtrack dissonance is part of the movie for the most part.
  • The long montage showing the discoveries of several brutally murdered corpses set to the piano coda from Derek and the Dominos' "Layla".
• In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin plays with a giant globe balloon to the hauntingly beautiful strains of the prelude to Richard Wagner's Lohengrin.
• In Grizzly Park, where most of the music is soft acoustic, the DVD menu plays an ominous sounding tune overlapping some scenes from the film (bear confrontations mostly). Once the film is finished and the main menu appears however, instead of hearing the same music again, you are instead suddenly listening to a familiar childrens' camp song known as "The Other Day, I Saw a Bear", complete with happy voices (presumably childrens') and the same exact bear scenes from before. A roaring, bloodthirsty bear coupled with a cheery campfire tune? No thank you.
• Grosse Pointe Blank opens with the main character assassinating citizens to "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash, a cheery, upbeat little number.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) uses this trope extensively, as a result of the mix tape Starlord carries with him from Earth.
  • Starlord is introduced with an ominous helmet, a stark, dark alien landscape and the song "Come and Get Your Love".
  • "Hooked on a Feeling" by Blue Swede plays over Quill being beaten viciously and then the heroes being thrown in the Kyln.
  • "Escape (the Piña Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes plays over the heroes jailbreak from the Kyln.
  • Quill starts singing "Ooh Child" at the end to distract Ronan so that he won't notice Quill's allies mounting an attack to separate the Infinity Stone from Ronan's war hammer.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: The opening credits have Baby Groot dancing around to "Mr. Blue Sky" by Electric Light Orchestra while the Guardians fight an interdimensional beast. Later in the movie, we have "Come a Little Bit Closer" by Jay & The Americans play while Yondu and Rocket massacre the mutinous Ravagers.
  • The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special: Mantis and Drax chase Kevin Bacon to become Quill's Christmas present to "I Want An Alien For Christmas" by Fountains of Wayne. The choice of soundtrack does make a strange kind of sense if you think of it from Mantis and Drax's point of view - since they're not from earth, Kevin is an alien to them.
• Halloween:
  • Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) has the light warblings of "Mister Sandman", before a slightly-sinister octave shift. Then a full out switch to head-down evil.
    • Which is a clear homage to Halloween II (1981), which ended with the original song playing as flames engulfed Michael's corpse.
    • In Zombie's Halloween II (2009), a cover of "Love Hurts" plays over Laurie's Dying Dream. This is only in the Director's Cut — in the Theatrical Cut, she is institutionalized in Smith's Grove as the traditional theme music plays.
    • The use of 10cc's "The Things We Do For Love", which plays in the background as we see a man's face mashed to a pulp from a car wreck and his badly-injured passenger spitting out the ultimate Cluster F-Bomb. Word of God states this was based on an incident that happened to a friend of Zombie's.
• Happiness is the king of this trope, playing upbeat jazzy music/happily melodramatic music to scenes involving mass murder, ejaculation, and pedophilia. This is to be expected of such a disturbing Black Comedy.
• Happy Death Day has a Failure Montage scored by Demi Lovato's "Confident", contrasting a song about empowerment with a protagonist discovering she's powerless against a slasher who always finds a way to find her and kill her.
• Hard Core, a 1979 film directed by Paul Schrader and starring George C. Scott, has Susan Raye's "Precious Memories" playing in the opening and closing credits. As the film is about a conservative Calvinist man looking for his missing daughter in the pornographic underworld, the dissonance of the music helps underscore mainstream society's comfortable ignorance of the shocking reality of the lives of those who work in the sex industry.
• Harry Potter:
  • The Goblet of Fire has Harry's friends sing the cheerful Hogwarts school song in the background while an ominous score plays and Harry discovers the body of Barty Crouch, Sr in the Forbidden Forest. The scene is recalled later after Harry returns from the Little Hangleton graveyard and the scene of Voldemort's return clutching Cedric's dead body to the sound of a cheering Hogwarts crowd and the band playing the bouncy, brassy, fully-orchestrated version of the song.
  • In The Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore has just died, and they play cheerful, almost carnival music over the credits.
  • Umbridge's leitmotif is outwardly bright and happy, much like the character. However, the brightness and happiness in the song is played in a minor key, so you can actually sense evil lurking beneath it.
• The Haunting of Molly Hartley. The movie ends with her now stuck working for the devil, apathetically dismissing her father as a disturbed mental patient, and then a graduation speech at high school, with happy music played over the last scene and credits.
• In Hellboy, Dr. Bruttenholm resigns himself to his murder while "We'll Meet Again" plays on a phonograph across the room, in a shoutout to Dr. Strangelove.
• Film composer Henry Mancini discusses this trope in his autobiography, referring to it as "playing against the scene."
• High Risk have a band of terrorists taking over a hotel, one of them — the girlfriend of the terrorist leader, and a Dark Action Girl — killing the guards in a surveillance room, and then turning on a radio playing classical music. Then the terrorists barges into the hotel's lobby and massacres the staff, killing around thirty people in under a minute, as classical ballroom music continues playing in the background.
• The opening credits for The Hills Have Eyes (2006) play the song "More And More" over nuclear testings and photos of deformed children. (Although the deforming had actually been caused by Agent Orange, which was used in The Vietnam War.)
• In the trailer for the video game movie Hitman, the titular character is shown killing large numbers of Mooks... while Schubert's "Ave Maria" plays in the background.
• Hobo with a Shotgun has a violent bloodbath that includes the main character dying at the end which segues into the 1980's song Run With Us. Yes, THAT ''Run With Us''.
• Hostel Part II gives us a lovely scene where a man is eaten alive while the famous opera piece Habanera from Carmen plays in the background. Definitely something you think of when you see a man squirming in pain while his leg is being carved down to the bone, right?
• In House, Betty Everett's "You're No Good" plays while William Katt chops up the corpse of a witch and buries her in the backyard.
• Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses has Slim Whitman's "I Remember You" playing over super slow motion scenes of graphic torture and murder.
• In the Outkast musical Idlewild, the song "Happy Days Are Here Again" plays over a radio in a garage while Rooster watches Deceptive Disciple Trumpy off Spats and Sunshine Ace.
• In the Loop features a scene during which Jamie McDonald angrily trashes a fax machine from which a document containing classified intelligence was printed and leaked to the opposition, while opera music plays from a computer in the background. Jamie quickly notices this, and orders that someone "turn that fucking racket off!"
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: while having creepy mannequin-filled suburban homes was vaguely justified by it being a nuclear test, what purpose could setting up a bunch of TV sets to play Howdy Doody possibly serve?!
  • That scene was based directly on a real nuclear test that was actually conducted in 1957. The TV sets and radios were on because the entire purpose of the test was to determine the effects of a distant airburst on a typical suburban neighbourhood.
• Insidious manages to make "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" by Tiny Tim unnerving; it's played during two incredibly creepy, tense scenes.
• In the controversial The Interview, Jenny Lane's cover of "Firework" plays as Kim Jong-un's helicopter is shot down by a tank all in slow-mo.
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) has Amazing Grace (the bagpipe version) playing when Donald Sutherland finds the pods being loaded onto a cargo ship. Amazing Grace was playing just to lure humans to the ship.
• Not sure what to make of the end credits for Iron Man. Sure, the Black Sabbath song kicks about as much ass as the title character, but when the song was originally written, it was specifically written to make the character out as a villain, so as to distinguish him as much as possible from the comic book superhero. In a way, the song works better for Obadiah Stane than it does for Tony Stark. Which is probably why the credits have only the instrumental parts of the song...
• The Island (1980): During the sequences when the pirates board their chosen targets, music styled after the scores for classic swashbuckling pirate films is played to underscore the contrast of the romanticized image of pirates from those films with the savage murderers shown here.
• James Bond:
  • Partially subverted at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which features Bond cradling his dead wife in his arms. We immediately cut to the Closing Credits as the normally upbeat James Bond theme plays... but it's a version of the theme that sounds brittle and almost manic.
    • Played straight earlier in when being chased by the Big Bad's henchmen, a cheery Christmas song with backing vocals done by children plays.
    • And earlier, Bond knocks a skiing henchman off a cliff to his death and as he falls, you can hear happy music playing from speakers in a neary village.
  • The Spy Who Loved Me provides a video example of this trope. As Big Bad Karl Stromberg feeds one of his traitorous assistants to his pet shark, a sample of Bach's Air on the G-String is played.
  • The theme of the unofficial Bond movie Never Say Never Again is a light, easy-listening tune, and it's first played during what is revealed to be a training scenario where Bond beats the crap out of everyone.
  • Quantum of Solace does this more or less in the opera scene, because both the action and the music deal with death, although the opera music feels dissonant to the gritty action scene that it underscores.
  • The French song "Boum!" sung by Charles Trenet is played on Silva's island in Skyfall. It's a joyful tune about nature, love and thunder while the island is devoid of people other than Silva and his mooks and it's heard playing as Bond and Silva play a William Telling game with Severine.
    • Silva seems to enjoy the word "Boom". Later, he attacks Bond and M by helicopter, with PA speakers blasting out John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom Boom Boom", an uptempo blues standard.
• The titular song in Jeepers Creepers goes the way of many children's songs, triggering nearly a Pavlovian response (run, hide) by the gruesome close of the film.
• Jerry Maguire has an in-universe example, after Cush initially agrees to stay as Jerry's client: an elated Jerry is driving on the highway, and switches through several radio stations as he tries to find some triumphant music to sing along to. Eventually he settles on "Free Fallin'" by Tom Petty, which isn't really a triumphant song.
• Joker (2019): During the climax, TV talkshow host Murray Franklin has been shot dead by the Joker, and the broadcast cuts out when the clown mockingly uses Murray's Signing Off Catchphrase. Said interruption used the upbeat and peppy song "Spanish Flea", which continued playing during news coverage of the murder and subsequent rioting in Gotham City.
• The theme song from Jurassic Park is surprisingly upbeat for a movie about dinosaurs eating people. It is not, however, surprisingly upbeat when you think of it as an in-universe theme song for the park itself.
• Kelly's Heroes has resident Crazy Is Cool Cloud Cuckoo Lander tank commander Oddball ambushing a German work camp with three Shermans while playing an Ear Worm on loudspeakers. The song in question? "All For The Love Of Sunshine" by Hank Williams Jr.
• Kick-Ass:
  • Hit-Girl makes her first appearance flipping around in an apartment and slaughtering all the drug dealers in the room. The music that accompanies this? The theme song from The Banana Splits (a cover of it, anyway).
  • Kick-Ass 2 also rolls with this with almost every track. Most notably when "The Saint's Go Marching In" when the team beats up a crime ring. Other examples include the classical song "Euphoria, Take My Hand" playing when Mindy uses a device to make three Alpha Bitch Cheerleaders projectile vomit. Lastly a rock cover of the Tetris theme plays when Henchwoman Mother Russia massacres 10 cops.
• In the final scene of Kid Detective (2020), upbeat, comedic music plays as the titular protagonist dissolves into messy sobs.
• The Killer (2023). The title character puts on headphones to avoid distraction when he's about to carry out the opening contract killing, but in a variation, we keep cutting back and forth between the music he's listening to and the noises of the outside world.
• John Woo plays Handel's "Messiah" overture at one point during the big Church Shootout from The Killer (1989).
• Kingsman: The Secret Service:
  • This film practically makes a game of pairing hilarious music to horrific events. Exploding heads to "Pomp and Circumstance"^note Doubly hilarious: British viewers will know the song as "Land of Hope and Glory", a hymn about the glory of the British Empire is but one example.
  • The climactic fight alternates between dramatic orchestration and KC & the Sunshine Band's "Give it Up".
  • And the (involuntary, thanks to Valentine's rage-inducing SIM cards) massacre of the Westboro-style church congregation being set to the guitar solos of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird".
  • The sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle continues the trend, setting the hero's assault on the villains' base to Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" and the final fight is set to The BossHoss's cover of Cameo's "Word Up". The use of Elton John's music is at least thematically appropriate as the musician appears in the film As Himself, held hostage by the Big Bad for musical entertainment, and in fact participates peripherally in the fight scene.
• At the climax of Kiss the Girls, a cheerful and upbeat version of the song "Goodnight, Irene" plays as the villain tries to rape the heroine, who eluded his grasp earlier in the movie. This is paired with Lyrical Dissonance, as the song lyrics are actually FAR too dark (with allusions to murder and suicide) for the manner in which it is sung.
• The German movie Krabat, about a boy who learns Black Magic from a warlock owning a mill who made a Deal with the Devil and has to sacrifice one of his twelve apprentices per year, lest he loses his own soul (and life). Said boy overcomes said warlock with the help of his girl and The Power of Friendship. Cue the closing credits with the song "Wir sind allein" (we are alone). Er... what? Wasn't the whole point of the movie that he's NOT alone?
  • You know, the boy and the girl are alone NOW. Bow Chicka Wow Wow.
• Film/Ladyhawke is a romantic epic set in the Medieval Era, yet has a very 1980's electro-synth score.
• The Last Days on Mars (2013). The astronauts are playing "Blue Skies Are Around The Corner" by Jack Hylton (because they'll be heading back to Earth soon) as a menacing Martian dust storm bears down on them.
• The Baddies' Theme from the original The Last House on the Left which was peppy and cheery playing over the baddies taking Mari and Phyllis away to abuse and murder them. Given that the lyrics of said peppy song say let's have some fun with those two little children and off them as soon as we're done it can be also regarded as Lyrical Dissonance.
• Duran Duran's Ordinary World provides the jarring background music to a truly savage beating dished out in a greasy-spoon cafe in Layer Cake.
• Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds is littered with it:
  • A man and woman talking over BGM that implies things are about to get X-rated. It might be a fake-out but the conversation implies nothing of the sort.
  • The music as one character gets eaten alive sounds oddly Relax-o-Vision-y.
  • Late-1970s-style funk plays during a tense search scene in the woods, and when the dinosaurs start raising hell all over town.
  • An inane love song playing over the film's climax, which involves the film's heroes being burned to death by molten lava.
• Leo the Last has "Moonlight Sonata" playing while Leo's mansion burns.
• One of the scenes of burning Kuwaiti oil wells in Lessons of Darkness by Werner Herzog is soundtracked by "Siegfried's Funeral March" by Richard Wagner, which is rather more triumphant than you might expect from the title.
• In Lethal Weapon, "Jingle Bell Rock" is the first song we hear. And then a half-naked, coked-up prostitute throws herself off a hotel balcony.
• In both the movie and the novel Little Big Man, towards the end when Custer's 7th Cavalry is massacring a Native American village, including the protagonist's family, in the background is the cheery strains of "Garry Owen" played by the regimental band. This was the actual marching song of the 7th cavalry. John Ford did it earlier in The Searchers, where there's a scene of US cavalry returning from slaughtering an Indian village and hustling the survivors (mostly white women captured by the Indians) off to a fort to the strains of the same tune. Probably based on the same action by the 7th Cavalry, it takes place in the middle of winter.
• Lord of Illusions: A 1950s-style upbeat jingle about being a good Christian plays during a montage of Nix's old cult members having murdered their relatives and taking off to witness their master's resurrection.
• Justified in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. When Denethor demands Pippin sing him a song, Pippin tells him that hobbits don't know any songs appropriate to a war, only happy songs. Denethor tells him to sing one anyway. The song that follows (taken from an earlier and happier point in the books) accompanies images of soldiers being sent on a suicide mission and killed. Pippin sings the happy lyrics so sadly that it's almost appropriate.
• Fritz Lang's M uses this trope with In the Halls of the Mountain King. The criminally insane child murderer whistles (often slowly, and off-key) this upbeat song when he feels the urge to kill rising within him.
• In The Madness of King George the scene where the king is gagged and bound to a chair for the first time is ironically underscored with the coronation anthem from Handel's Zadok the Priest.
• In Main Street Meats, you should expect to hear a lot of country and rock songs being played over scenes of murder.
• Marie Antoinette (2006): the film is set in the time of the actual Marie Antoinette, but its soundtrack is deliberately and loudly filled with 70s and 80s New Wave/Punk/Glam Rock acts (New Order, Adam & the Ants, Siouxsie and the Banshees).
• The end credits music from Marley & Me, which is a rather optimistic pop song sung at the end of the film in which the titular dog dies.
• Massacre at Central High: The opening credits play over shots of David running alternating with shots of cars exploding and David getting beaten up, all while the peaceful song "Crossroads" plays.
• Mean Guns: Many scenes of killings and violent shoot-outs or meelee fights are accompanied by delightful mambo music.
• Metallica: Through the Never: One shot of the riot is from inside a building's lobby, where peaceful elevator music plays.
• Midsommar ends with a triumphant orchestra score as Dani completely loses it and smiles as she watches a building with three live men, including her ex-boyfriend, burn down. At one point, the song drops this with the sound of the screaming cult around her and droning in the distance as if the horror of the situation finally hits, but it swells up again as if Dani surrenders herself to the point of no return.
• A particularly violent shootout in The Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing is set to the somber love-song "Danny Boy," which is playing on a phonograph.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series:
  • Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation has a scene where Benji plays Halo to the sound of Le Nozze Di Figaro.
  • Invoked by Benji in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, when he lets "Ain't that a kick in the head?" play over the loudspeakers during the prison riot.
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). Mondo Bongo plays during the final shootout. However this is a Call-Back to when we first hear the song as the protagonists fall in love during their Dance of Romance in Bogata, and shows they've now come together again as a Battle Couple.
• The horror comedy film Mom and Dad makes use of this a few times:
  • Riley getting strangled by her mom happens with soft, gentle music playing over it.
  • Kendall's sister attempting to kill her newborn child is done to the tune of "It Must Have Been Love".
  • Brent's father attempting to kill him has "Chains of Love" playing over it. Justified, as the song was playing on the car's radio when Josh turned it on.
• Monkey Man has a fight scene with "By the Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. as its backing track - a mellow, chilled-out song to accompany the protagonist shivving several security guards.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian features the Crucifixion, with all the crucified singing Eric Idle's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life".
  • When Graham Chapman died in 1989, the five remaining members of Monty Python reunited at his funeral to sing "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" after John Cleese's eulogy ("Graham Chapman is an ex-Python. He has ceased to be.") In 2005, a survey by Music Choice showed that it was the third most popular song Britons would like played at their funerals.
  • Monty Python is quite good for this. For example, in The Meaning of Life, where "The Galaxy Song", a cheery, happy-go-lucky tune with vaguely upbeat lyrics about the wondrous vastness of the universe that ends on a big downer ("pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, cause there's bugger all down here on Earth"), plays after a scene wherein a man has his organs harvested while he's still alive. Immediately after the song finishes, the wife agrees to undergo the process herself.
    • Also, the happy and campy music in the intermission, set in the middle of a highly-dramatized scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• When the trailer for The Mummy (2017) was mistakenly uploaded to YouTube without music, fans had a field day with it. Many of them spliced upbeat songs into the trailer, such as "Jingle Bell Rock" and the Benny Hill theme.
• In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured film The Crawling Hand, our hero, possessed by something from an arm that fell from space, strangles the malt shop owner nearly to death while "Surfin' Bird" plays.
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Okay, it's a comedy, but the juxtaposition of the bright and cheerful Here Comes Santa Claus with the images of SWAT teams surrounding the Griswold residence is a classic example of using this trope for deliberate humorous effect.
• Natural Born Killers:
  • Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" over a scene of a prison riot. The lyrics fit, but the distant, contemplative tone does not.
  • The I Love Mallory sequence has cheery sitcom music amidst the rampant domestic and sexual abuse in Mallory's family and Mickey bringing a body bag of a man to their house.
• Needful Things couples this with Left the Background Music On. Two characters hack and slash at each other in typically King gore fashion to the tune of Ave Maria. It then cuts to the movie's antagonist listening to a record of this song.
• Nekromantik has a very beautiful soundtrack, sporting both soft and boisterous orchestral music that wouldn't feel out of place in an arthouse drama. The film itself, however, revolves primarily on the topic of necrophilia and overall has a lot of gorn.
• Next of Kin (1982): The slightly eerie-sounding Klaus Schulze composition "Georg Trakl" plays over Linda reading her mother's seemingly banal diary entries for the first time, suggesting that later readings will not be as pleasant for her. Later, the same piece plays over a rather romantic scene of Linda and Barney playfully frolicking in the woods.
• In The Night of the Hunter, the truly nightmarish villain goes around singing gospel. There's also a scary montage of the children traveling downriver with a lullaby in the background.
• Night Crawler has a calm, uplifting soundtrack, and it's about a cold blooded sociopath recording and manipulating crime scenes and selling them for profit.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street:
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge ends with Bing Crosby's incredibly soft, relaxing "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?".
  • "All I Have To Do Is Dream" becomes Paranoia Fuel if you associate it with the remake of the original film. All you have to do is dream...
• In 9½ Weeks, there is a scene involving food that would normally be intended to be erotic. Until you realize that the song playing in the scene is the novelty song "Bread and Butter" by The Newbeats, which ends up making the scene lighthearted and somewhat humorous in an otherwise downbeat film.
• "Nobody But Me" by the Human Beinz is a popular ironic song to play in the background of gratuitous violence: See The Bride vs. the 88's or the convince store brawl in The Departed.
• Office Space: The use of gangsta rap throughout a film about white-collar jobs (and, ultimately, white-collar crime). Punctuated when they destroy a piece of office equipment as though they were beating a person to death. Soundtrack dissonance is the source of maybe half the laughs in the movie.
  • The movie studio got pissed too when Mike Judge originally used the music, but let him keep it when a test screening resulted in positive feedback for the soundtrack.
• In Oldboy (2003), Vivaldi's "Winter" plays while Oh Dae-su rips Mr Park's teeth out and in the corridor fight scene that follows it.
• 127 Hours is a film about the life of Aron Ralston and how he got his arm trapped in a boulder while rock climbing. One scene of the film features him trying to get his arm out by creating a pulley system with his supplies. The song playing in this scene? "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers.
• Done in One Night at McCool's with the Village People's song "YMCA" being played to a crazy shootout scene.
• Subverted in the second Ong-Bak movie, in that the long fight scene at the end switches between fast-paced metal, what sounds like Ominous Latin Chanting and singing in some unspecified language. All are appropriate to the scene, hence the subversion, but the change is noticeable.
• The obscure British film Parting Shots has this during the numerous murder scenes. Pointed out by Film Brain, among many other things.
• Pink Flamingos has the final scene set to "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window". The scene in question has Divine picking up and eating dog poop. This scene is purportedly exploited in The Funday Pawpet Show in the Pink Flamingo challenge. Apparently, those who've watched that scene are never be able to listen to that song ever again without gagging.
• Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in Platoon. You wouldn't call it cheerful, but it is extremely beautiful, much like war isn't.
• Play Misty for Me ends with — what else? — Erroll Garner's "Misty" on the soundtrack.
• Poltergeist (1982) inexplicably begins with "The Star-Spangled Banner" playing over the credits; our confusion is resolved when we realize it's a TV station playing the national anthem before ending their broadcast for the evening.
• In Poor Pretty Eddie, Eddie's first rape of Liz is intercut with rednecks forcing two dogs to mate, all set to a peaceful country song.
• In Precious, this happens frequently throughout the movie, but an obvious example is when an upbeat gospel Christmas song is playing as Precious's mother kicks her out and throws a TV at her and her week-old baby.
• The President's Analyst: Dr. Schaefer, hiding out with a hippie rock band, makes love with a girl in the tall grass in a meadow, as Barry Mc Guire plays a quiet, contemplative song on acoustic guitar — unaware that several spies from different nations are creeping up to capture him. Each spy encounters and kills another one in his path, and the couple end walking off with a trail of corpses behind them.
• The Proposition opens with a small child singing a song called "Happy Land" while old-timey family photographs fly by. Some of the photos are of burnt-out houses, and labeled "The Site of the Hopkins Massacre". When the music stops, we are then plunged into the middle of a vicious gunfight. There is also the calm, melancholy "Peggy Gordon", which is sung while a character is being brutally flogged. It is also sung again at the climax, when a rape is occurring. In fact, it's sung by the rapist.
• The trailer for Psycho featured Alfred Hitchcock giving the audience a tour of the set, vaguely describing parts of the film in order to arouse curiosity with a sinister narrative. Transitions between the set pieces were punctuated by cheery 50's light music.
• P2 includes a scene of a tied up woman struggling to get out of a locked car trunk with "Santa Baby" playing in the background. What makes it a little more unnerving is that it's diegetic — the security guard Stalker with a Crush who put her there started blaring some holiday music over the intercom system to drown out her screams.
• Public Domain Feature Films often suffer from this.
  • The Lost World (1925) get a good dose of this for all the wrong reasons. Imagine happy springtime music playing while an Allosaurus bears down on the hero's campsite. Ya see? Thank god the DVD versions have the original score(s).
  • Nosferatu. We get the pure horror that is Orlok, but with a jazzy high-hat in the background. Not quite right. Especially since the original score is so damn good.
• The Punisher (2004): Frank Castle's fight with The Russian is drowned out by Verdi's "La donna è mobile".
• Pumpkins: When the pub and its patrons make their debut in this movie, an upbeat folk song plays over both the patrons having a good time, and Pam running through the woods in fear in the dark.
• Quentin Tarantino:
  • Reservoir Dogs has two such instances: the use of "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel for the infamous scene where Mr. Blonde tortures a cop; and the use of Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" in the closing credits immediately following the bloody finale where everybody dies. The scene was intended by Tarantino as an homage to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist sings "Singin' in the Rain" during a home invasion.
  • Pulp Fiction: Tarantino originally wanted to use The Knack's "My Sharona" during the scene when Butch decided to rescue Marsellus as he was beaten and raped by Maynard, the pawn shop clerk, and his security guard friend, Zed. He felt that the song had a "good sodomy beat to it". Since the song was already licensed to Reality Bites, Tarantino used "Comanche" by The Revels.
  • Kill Bill. The Bride slices up the Crazy 88 to jazz and J-pop. And, conversely, having O-Ren and The Bride square off against each other to the incredibly loud and energetic "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", only to have it stop immediately when first blood is drawn.
• In Akira Kurosawa's Ran, one of the battles witnessed by Hidetora starts out to the accompaniment of a mournful music, but with no sound effects. In a very effective switch, you then abruptly only hear the loud sounds of the fighting but no music. Soundtrack dissonance was a very personal and important thing to Kurosawa. When his father died in 1948, he was walking around Tokyo to clear his thoughts and was tormented by the sound of the "Cuckoo Waltz". He told the composer for his upcoming film Drunken Angel to use the "Cuckoo Waltz" for ironic effect. He also went on to use soundtrack (and sound effect) dissonance for Stray Dog and Seven Samurai.
• In the comedy Rat Race, the triumphant score of "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" plays even as Blaine and Duane Cody's plan to sabotage the airport by bringing down their radar tower goes horribly awry. What could have been merely amusing becomes side-splittingly hilarious even as their SUV is dragged right up the tower.
  • It happens again when they try to split up and end up chasing Hardware Store Guy, stealing a balloon and crashing into cows to the tune of deep classical music.
• Recorded Live has quite an upbeat piano score for a short film about sentient film reels that eat human flesh.
• Red Rocket: *NSYNC's “Bye Bye Bye” plays during the opening credits as well as during one of the film’s iconic scenes where Mikey is running naked through the streets at night, junk jiggling and all.
• Rigoletto (not to be confused with the opera,) footage of a child singing in a contest is both interspersed with and the soundtrack for a scene of her adult friend being beaten — apparently to death — by an angry mob. The innocence of the song makes the violent attack on an innocent man seem all the more horrifying, even though the scene isn't visually graphic at all.
• Ring of Fear jumps straight from the gruesome Sound-Only Death of O'Malley being mauled to pieces by a tiger to the ridiculously cheerful and upbeat song "The Circus is Coming".
• In Rock N Rolla there's a peaceful and calming piano song playing over images of a man getting the tar beat out of him.
• Roger & Me plays "Wouldn't It Be Nice" over streets full of derelict buildings and a news announcement saying that rats now outnumber humans in Flint. Earlier, an autoworker told a story that he heard "Wouldn't It Be Nice" over the radio during a nervous breakdown and says that it's a pretty awful song to listen to during a breakdown.
• In Run Lola Run "What a difference a day makes" plays whilst Lola and Manni are being chased by the police.
• In Schindler's List, a German soldier plays Bach's second "English Suite" on the piano (and not Mozart like one of the two listeners thought) while the SS troops are massacring the inhabitants of the Krakow Ghetto.
  • And the scene when the Germans put Gute Nacht Mutter and a child's song on the camp's speakers while making the selection of persons that can work, while the unlucky ones were put on a train of death or boarded trucks to be shot in the woods.
  • The scariest part is that this is a partial Truth in Television; some of the heads of the extermination camps would allow a reprieve for prisoners to live longer if they had musical skill, these prisoners would play music, although never "German" music, while the mass executions occurred.
• The German movie Schtonk!, a satire based on the forgery and publication of Hitlers diaries, starts at the End of the Battle of Berlin with soldiers carrying the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun outside. The music that plays is an actual German wartime song that goes "This is not the end of the world! Things will brighten up again!". It's entirely intentional.
• Shallow Grave plays this to fantastic effect as a Mind Screw, typically juxtaposing scenes of horrific violence and torture with bright, cheery music (and occasionally interspersing scenes of wanton excess and debauchery). Most notable in the ending sequence, where Andy Williams' Happy Heart plays, even as we see that one of the main characters has been stabbed with a steak knife and is lying in a pool of his own blood, another has been tricked out of the money she thought she'd be getting and is now forced into a life on the lam with nothing but the clothes on her back, and the third is now a corpse being tended to in the morgue.
• A couple of scenes in Shame, such as when Brandon listens to gentle piano music when out running while Sissy and David have sex on his bed.
• Lampshaded twice in Shaun of the Dead, as the jukebox in the pub starts up and plays an unwanted song at the worst possible moment. A depressing love song plays as Shaun ponders the loss of his girlfriend. While beating down a zombie old man, Queen's chirpy "Don't Stop Me Now" starts playing and the humans time their blows with the music.
• She Wore a Yellow Ribbon has a scene with an operation performed on a moving wagon, where the colonel's wife (Mildred Natwick) sings the cheerful song of the title to help the patient to take his mind off the pain.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has Moriarty playing a phonograph of Die Forrelle, a cheerful Schubert piece, as Holmes is being tortured.
• The infamous driver's ed scare film Signal 30 and its sequel Mechanized Death both use jaunty stock cues to accompany footage of gruesome car accidents.
• The Silence of the Lambs has a few of these, including Buffalo Bill's disturbing dance to the tune of "Goodbye Horses" while his victim screams in the background, and Hannibal killing and cannibalizing two guards while wistfully listening to Bach's "Goldberg Variations".
• In Silent Hill, the heroine finds herself surrounded by screeching burnt baby things, and they're slowly advancing on her...and she's trapped in a back-alley. She collapses, and then wakes up, babies gone, with Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" playing on a jukebox nearby.
• Silent Night, Deadly Night. Just watch the ending.
  Uploaders description: The music transition is awesome. From the musician practically having a seizure of the keyboard or two to an acapella Christmas carol. BRILLIANT!
• Sleeper uses jaunty ragtime jazz music in its shiny plastic future setting — justified as it fits Woody Allen's Fish out of Water predicament.
• Used well in The Social Network. When Mark is checking Erica's status update to see if she responds, after possibly losing his best friend, the peppy Beatles song "Baby, You're a Rich Man" is playing in the background, somewhat mocking his billionaire status.
• The original trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) featured Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise", which was criticized as a poor tonal fit for the character. The subsequent trailer used a cover of The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" instead.
• Space Mutiny, as pointed out by Mystery Science Theater 3000, has a scene where one of the bad guys quietly and calmly walks into a room... followed by epic DUN-DUNNA-DUN-DUN music.
• Spaceballs ends with the Spaceballs completely defeated, their ship about to self-destruct, and, as they desperately run for the escape pods, this song about how big and bad they are plays.
• In Spider-Man 2, when Peter Parker is working as a photographer as he sees Mary Jane and John Jameson walking down the stairs together, in each others arms, set to the tune of a saxophone cover of Stars and Stripes Forever. And when Peter loses his powers and decides to quit crime-fighting, there's a montage of him resuming a normal life set to "Raindrops Are Falling on My Head," but as the montage progresses, more and more reminders of the problems he can no longer help with begin rearing their ugly heads in front of him.
• Stanley Kubrick made extensive use of this trope, making a point to use it in many of his films:
  • Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
    • At the end, the doomsday switches have been flipped and mushroom clouds are erupting, all to the tune of the optimistic "We'll Meet Again". This was no accident; the entire movie is satire, so why not the closing montage?
    • The B-52's leitmotif is "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", as it embarks on a mission to nuke the Soviet Union it will probably never return home from.
    • The opening credits, a lush arrangement of "Try a Little Tenderness" turns military footage of a B-52 aerial refueling into soft-core porn.
  • Full Metal Jacket:
    • The film opens with the song "Hello Vietnam" by Johnnie Wright, which idealistically describes the war in Vietnam as a noble endeavor to preserve freedom.
    • "Surfin Bird" by The Trashmen plays as the camera pans over a bleak, wasteland-like firing line.
    • In the final scene, Marines march through a burning city, singing The Mickey Mouse Club theme.
  • A Clockwork Orange features a number of examples, including several scenes of violence set to beautiful classical music. Most notably, however, is the home invasion and rape set to Alex's performance of "Singing in the Rain". The song was chosen simply because Malcolm McDowell knew all the words offhand. The original version by Gene Kelly plays during the end credits.
  • The Shining uses Midnight, the Stars and You over the unsettling photograph at the end.
    • Bartok's Music for Percussion, Strings, and Celestia certainly doesn't belong in the scene in which it's heard.
    • Roadrunner cartoons can be heard in the background of otherwise intense scenes.
    • The first three minutes of the film is made of this trope.
• Star Wars:
  • The hangar scene from A New Hope, right after Obi-Wan's Heroic Sacrifice. While Luke and the stormtroopers exchange blaster fire, a traumatic, mournful tune provides the soundtrack.
  • The prequel movie Rogue One has some rather beautiful music playing when the Death Star appears above Scarif and fires its Wave-Motion Gun, nuking the surface and killing everyone.
  • The Action Prologue of The Last Jedi features the Resistance successfully destroying a First Order superweapon, while a mournful dirge plays, given that the entire Resistance bomber fleet and a significant portion of their fighter force was lost in the effort.
• Stardust (2006) has a fight scene set to the tune of the "Can-Can", where the swords clash in time to the music.
• The scenes of Bruno stalking Miriam through the carnival in Strangers on a Train are accompanied by music appropriate to the setting, but it becomes even more dissonant when he strangles her to death as the scene becomes very quiet except for the music. The carnival music starts playing again much later when Bruno goes into a kind of trance and nearly strangles a different woman, thankfully passing out before she suffocates.
• In the documentary Super Size Me, the Blue Danube plays. To the tune of a person having a bypass surgery, in graphic detail. Might be a subversion, because not only is the surgery quick and painless, but the person is shown to be alive and healthy(er) in the epilogue.
• Used for comedic purpose in Student Bodies. During the funeral of the Breather's first victims university band plays a slightly downtempo Ode to Joy.
• Used in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story with the dissonance being both visual and harmonic as two Carpenters songs play whilst anorexic Karen Carpenter (played by a Barbie doll) vomits.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: The reprise of "Pretty Women" just before Sweeney kills Judge Turpin.
• Terminator series:
  • The Terminator deliberately invokes this with the New Wave floorfiller "Burning in the Third Degree" as the T-800 marches into the Tech-Noir club, fading to a Drone of Dread Last Note Nightmare when it zeroes in on Sarah in slow motion.
  • The final scene of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines shows the launch of the nuclear missiles on Judgment Day annihilating cities while a gentle violin melody plays.
• The original ending of Thelma & Louise featured an instance of this. In the final cut, the car sails off the edge and freezes in mid-flight as the song "Thunderbird" is reprised. In the original ending, though, the car continues traveling downwards and flipping end over end into the canyon as BB King's "Better Not Look Down" (an upbeat song about keeping your spirits up) plays. The music keeps playing over Harvey Keitel's cop character looking down regretfully before cutting back to a shot of the car driving towards another canyon. The ending was meant to symbolize the pair continuing their journey in spirit, but the music is uplifting for a situation that was caused by circumstances beyond the control of the main characters.
• A case could be made for The Third Man, with its happy zither music.
• Thor, the God of Thunder, the mightiest of the norse gods, was included in the film Thor. And the soundtrack was by... Foo Fighters.
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has this trope in spades. Most infamously, a beautiful opera song plays while Mildred burns down the police station.
• In the movie/documentary Touching the Void, a mountain climber recalls as he made his way back to his tent alone and with no supplies, he at one point had "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Boney M stuck in his head. We are then treated to a surreal, nightmarish sequence of him walking across the desolate icy landscape, while the song plays relentlessly over and over again.
• The Film of the Book version of Trainspotting features this throughout, but the most genius is Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" over shots of the protagonists running from the cops in the beginning, and then later, the exact same footage is set to Blur's "Sing", creating a completely different scene entirely.
  • That scene's very good; however, the whole "Renton O'Ding to Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day'" is, by far, the best example.
• In the thriller Transsiberia, a tense chase scene is set to the cheery Russian folk song "Kalinka".
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL singing "Daisy Bell" as it dies.
• In the 1955 adaptation and the 2017 adaptation of The Unknown Soldier, Jean Sibelius' Finlandia Hymn plays near the end, as the wounded and weary Finnish troops march home across the war-scarred landscape. The effect may not come across as well to non-Finnish viewers, but to a Finnish audience the contrast between such patriotic song and the image of loss and destruction is quite stark.
• The scene in The Untouchables (1987) where Malone gets his guts machine-gunned to pieces by Al Capone's sniper, and proceeds to agonizingly drag himself down his hallway, spitting and oozing massive amounts of blood as he goes. The scene is interspliced with clips of Capone watching a performance of the opera Pagliacci, and sincerely weeping over the beauty of the singer's voice. The music is not cut off whenever the scene cuts away from the opera — it continues to play over both locations.
• In U Turn, the volume on the relaxing, almost elevator music-esque song playing on a grocery store's radio inexplicably cranks up as its owner guns down a couple of escaping robbers with a double-barreled shotgun.
• V for Vendetta: Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture playing as the British Parliament building is demolished by a trainload of explosives and fireworks. Of course, it's also more fitting than anything, given that the Overture itself features cannons, and it has a lot of symbolic significance in the film.
• Likely owing to its avant-garde nature and lack of dialog, Vase de Noces is full of this. The film contains scenes involving the farmer putting baby heads on doves, taking a bath, and vomiting into the bucket he uses as a toilet that are accompanied by bombastic church choir chanting and organ music.
• In War of the Worlds (2005), light-hearted Christmas-type music plays from speakers as refugees pour onto the ferry point. Most of them are dead soon afterwards.
• Violent Night has Bryan Adams's "Christmas Time" playing while Santa Claus brutally and mercilessly slaughters an entire mercenary crew.
• Watchmen:
  • The opening scene of The Comedian's brutal murder with the romantic song "Unforgettable" playing in the background. This was deliberate, as one theme of the story is the eroticism of violence and how, for The Comedian especially, masked heroes only felt alive when they're beating the hell out of somebody. The song is also symbolic of the murderer, Adrian Veidt having never forgotten how The Comedian was the only person to ever defeat him in combat. Veidt also considers himself unforgettable. In his defence, he's certainly anything but dull.
    • The fact that the source of this music is a television advertisement for Veidt Industries' Nostalgia Perfume could be seen as an early clue that the assassin is Veidt himself.
  • The value-neutral-in-lyrics but somewhat-upbeat-in-tune The Times They Are A-Changin' (by Bob Dylan) playing over the various things that occurred in the leadup to the start of the film could be seen as similar, since most of the events — Silhouette's murder, Richard Nixon's election, Mothman's insanity, etc. — are bad things.
  • The use of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" during Dan and Laurie's sex scene. The song was already meant to be ironic and melancholy. The use of the word "Hallelujah" in contrast to the general mood of the song only emphasizes its mood, making it even more melancholy. The use of that song at that particular moment screams of "Hallelujah! I'm getting laid!"
  • KC & The Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man" playing over the Comedian's riot dispersal.
• We Need to Talk About Kevin features a scene where Eva has a nervous breakdown while driving home on Halloween night..with Buddy Holly's "Everyday" in the background.
• In the 1998 Canadian TV movie White Lies, Catherine Chapman (Sarah Polley) creeps through a library slipping neo-Nazi literature in between the books while "Put A Little Love In Your Heart" by Jackie DeShannon plays on the soundtrack.
• In Prelude to War, part of the Why We Fight series, Nazi marching scenes lifted from Triumph of the Will are ridiculed with a silly, repetitive military march (based on a segment of the Defiliermarsch) playing.
• The Wicker Man (1973) famously ends with the Anti-Hero being burned to death in the titular wicker man, while the townsfolk sing a rousing chorus of "Sumer is icumen in", led by Christopher Lee.
• Wild Beasts features a scene where a blind man is torn to pieces by his seeing eye dog while a gentle piano piece plays in the background. Justified, since he's actually shown putting that particular record on before he's attacked.
• In the road rage story of Wild Tales, Mario and Diego attempt to murder each other inside the latter's car while the radio plays "Lady, Lady, Lady" from Flashdance.
• For some reason, the original French dub of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has the original soundtrack during Willy Wonka's tunnel poem replaced with the instrumental version of "Pure Imagination".
• During The Wizard of Gore, when Montag is gleefully ripping bits out of his victims, a peppy jazz number plays every time.
  • Herschell Gordon Lewis seemed fond of this trope, see also the pantsuit-stripping scene in The Gore Gore Girls accompanied by the strains of an oompah band playing Strauss’ “Radetzky March.”
• The World According To Garp: After Garp gets shot and dies, they could have just run the ending credits in silence after the appropriate "There Will Never Be Another You". No, they had to reuse the bouncy "When I'm Sixty-Four" from the opening credits. This may have been on purpose, though.
• X-Men: Apocalypse has two cases:
  • When Apocalypse hijacks Xavier's mind through Cerebro to disable all of the world's nuclear warheads, the music starts off playing Ludwig van Beethoven's 7th Symphony before shifting to regular action music when Havok and Beast try and stop him.
  • The second (in quite possibly one of the funniest scenes in the film) has the Eurythmics' song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" playing while Quicksilver saves (almost) everyone at the X-Mansion from a massive explosion. It's because he's listening to it on his walkman.
• The somber musical score to Young Frankenstein is squarely at odds with the screwball tone of the film, yet somehow works perfectly well.

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