The sound of fear: How Goblin defined the movies of Dario Argento

A good soundtrack is as essential to the film as the dialogue or the actors. It should say things that the characters can’t, add colour where the images do not, and make you feel things before the story explains why. Throughout cinema’s early days, music was used to intensify the mood of a film, to make a romance feel weightless or to make you grip your chair in panic during an action set piece. But by the 1970s, that was beginning to change.

Directors started using music that was contradictory to the action on screen to disorient the audience or make them see things in the story that they hadn’t been expecting. Instead of holding the audience’s hand, the soundtracks threw them into the deep end of the cinematic experience so that they could come away with impressions rather than answers. 

Of these filmmakers, Dario Argento was a pioneer. The godfather of the Giallo genre, he is known for his lurid visual style, but it’s the music as much as anything else that makes his movies stick with you. To watch an Argento film is to be assaulted by gore and close-ups so extreme that they make objects as common as eyes and hands seem abstract. His colours are so vivid that it would take a powerful soundtrack to complement them, so he decided to take a different approach. The music in his most beloved movies is perfectly incongruous. Groovy, unnerving, and chaotic, it evokes a sense of derangement with flashes of sonic beauty, the perfect accompaniment to Argento’s visual style.

The Italian prog-rock band Goblin is the group responsible for this essential element of the director’s work. Originally known as The Cherry Five, it has been composed of various members over the years, anchored by keyboard player Claudio Simonetti. The group changed their name to Goblin around the time they collaborated with Argento for the first time on 1975’s Profondo Rosso, marking the beginning of their iconic sound. Their involvement in the project was supposedly a lucky accident when the original composer, Giorgio Gaslini, dropped out due to creative differences with Argento. As a result, Goblin had limited time to put together a score, but what they produced became a breakout hit. 

The music in Profondo Rosso is not as constant a presence as it is in Argento’s later films, but the director learned quickly that Goblin was one of the ingredients to his success. The film centres on an English piano player in Turin who is trying to track down a serial killer who murdered his neighbour. The search leads him to folk horror tales, a haunted mansion, and a series of grotesque toys, and Goblin’s contributions are the perfect counterpoint to the gruesome weirdness and sadistic killings on screen. The soundtrack blends jazz, prog rock, and heavy metal to create a groovy, repetitive riff that creates tension while remaining smooth. An organ introduced later in the film brings it all to a fever pitch.

By the time Argento made Suspiria in 1977, he recognised how important Goblin had become to his trademark style. The soundtrack for Profondo Rosso had to be recorded in a matter of days, but the soundtrack for Suspiria had weeks to come to fruition. Speaking to FACT Magazine decades after the film’s release, Simonetti recalled coming up with the now iconic theme, saying that it never worked for the group to start from the script. They needed free reign to come up with their own sound. Argento told them that he wanted to make the audience feel the presence of the witches from start to finish, even if they aren’t on screen, so the musicians got to work with some unusual instruments. 

“We tried to use a lot of ethnic instruments like tabla and bouzouki, and we did a lot of recording of sounds that we created, because in 1977 we didn’t have any samplers,” Simonetti recalled. They also got their hands on a System 50 Moog modular system that was used by Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Keith Emerson.

“I used it because I was a big fan of Keith Emerson,” Simonetti said. “Also because of the sequencer – of course, we didn’t use any computers.”

To create the looming spectre of the witches, the group used whispered voices with a rough edge instead of the sweetly high-pitched children’s voices of other horror soundtracks. The results are mystical, psychedelic, propulsive, and chilling. Simonetti called it Goblin’s masterpiece, and it’s no coincidence that the film, which takes place at a dance academy that may or may not be home to witches, is considered Argento’s masterpiece, too.

Suspiria is their most famous collaboration, but one of the film’s that the director and Goblin worked on together deserves greater appreciation. 1985’s Phenomena (not to be confused with the 1996 John Travolta movie Phenomenon) stars a young Jennifer Connelly as a young girl who attends a boarding school and discovers she can communicate with insects. It’s a departure for Argento. Drawing on the natural setting of Switzerland and a darker colour palette, its visual style is completely different from the colour-soaked visuals of his earlier movies.

Goblin’s contributions to the film are arguably even more important here than in any other of Argento’s films because they provide intensity and eccentricity to a movie that is, at least for two-thirds of its run-time, more like an ethereal fairytale than the swampy dungeon lair filled with human remains that it becomes. Full of shimmering synths and heavy bass lines, Goblin’s music is not outshined by the additional tracks from Iron Maiden and Motörhead. Set against the backdrop of the lush scenery, it offers a more incongruous counterpoint than in any other Argento film, making the nighttime sequences disorienting and frantic rather than dreamy and mysterious.

The word “auteur” gets tossed around liberally and is often (and correctly) applied to Argento. However, to view him as the sole creator of his distinctive style is an oversight. In their collaborations, Goblin is the obvious co-author, as necessary to the movies as Argento himself.

This is most obvious when watching the director’s work, which doesn’t involve the group. Six of his films were scored by legendary composer Ennio Morricone, whose collaborators included Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Terrence Malick, and Quentin Tarantino. Their pairing included some of Argento’s best movies, but Morricone’s scores were too compliant for such a bombastic filmmaker. In Argento’s 1970 horror flick The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, for example, the composer drew on soft, breathy vocals and children’s voices to create a soothing, nursery rhyme-style soundtrack. 

It’s a classically unsettling formula for a horror movie, but there is nothing jarring about it. If the director is allowed to create jump-scares, Goblin makes the case that the music should keep you on your toes, too. Throughout their collaboration with Argento, the group helped establish music as not just another character in a horror movie, but an element that can push and pull at expectations, hurtle you headfirst into the story, and tap you on the shoulder like a witch in the night, inviting you to shift focus and see the movies in a new light.

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