Everyone watches films at Halloween. OK, that’s a generalisation, but it’s a fairly accurate one: people watch stories made of images and sounds smashed together when they want to scare themselves.

It might be a little basic, but that combination is important. Some of the most visually adventurous and fundamental films in horror are the silent German expressionist works, such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu. As striking as their design is, watching them today is an uncanny experience. So comprehensively conditioned are we to expect a hefty chunk of the narrative delivered through sound, hearing just an orchestral score leaves a modern audience bereft. One of the legs supporting that particular emotional giraffe seems to have been amputated clean off. Poor giraffe.

What has emerged since this unification has obviously been a changeable thing. The most iconic sonic moment in horror is the shrill string stabs of Psycho, but for many years, in its 90’s torpor, the best anyone could come up with was the twee, sub-gothic shlock accompanying every single Tim Burton film. And indeed, for our own era, a new vocabulary has emerged.

You’ve probably heard it. It probably scared the shit out of you. It’s really, really simple. It goes like this: quietquietquietBANG. QuietquietquietquietquietBANG.

With the advent of superpowered surround sound multiplex screens, the sheer visceral impact of blasting the audience has proved to be the most effective way to provide consumers what they seem to want – lots of jumpscares – and because it’s so easy, it has provided a cop out for directors. They don’t need to motivate action, they don’t need to make you care about the characters, they don’t even need to show you what you’re meant to be frightened of. It has reduced horror to formulaically whacking the FX on.

This has shortchanged the genre. Horror is capable of exploring and expressing complex ideas, and sound plays a huge role in informing them. While the young Linda Blair gave an astonishing physical performance in The Exorcist, a huge part of the film’s power resides in her overdubbed voice spitting sexual obscenity and giving form to the test of dignity and faith presented by the invading demon.

Soundtracks can also recontextualise a film’s content – the most brilliant example being Sam Cooke’s doughy version of ‘Blue Moon’ playing through the extraordinary, seminal transformation sequence in An American Werewolf in London. It gives the scene a bizarre, pathetic tone, more nuanced than simply assaulting the audience with nightmarish plastic wizardry.

It need not be to lighten the mood though. Howard Shore has won Oscars for his work on The Lord of the Rings, but he learned his craft scoring David Cronenberg films. While his early body-horror work, such as Videodrome and Dead Ringers, displays real mastery of genre filmmaking, Cronenberg’s outstanding work is 1996’s Crash, a crushingly apathetic retelling of JG Ballard’s similarly titled novel about a group of people with an obsessional, paraphilic relationship with car crashes. Shore’s soundtrack is a sharp, icy thing, sliding sleekly over the film’s surfaces, all flat guitar and twisting arpeggios. It is one of the few elements of the film that pierces its numbly detached existence. It reminds you that these people do not deserve empathy, nor should they be considered ‘real’. They are, instead, a vile projection; repressed violence made flesh. The movie only becomes a horror film in reflection, and the score exists to point the way.

Once that leap is made, once sound becomes a component of the film’s expression, once the audiovisual giraffe has been reassembled, a vast swathe of new possibilities is unlocked. We can only imagine how the creators of the future will chill us, creep us out, and frighten us like little children. Or they could go BANG really loudly again. They could always do that.