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The Dies Irae is a melody that composers of film music have employed in hundreds of films, ranging from Metropolis to The Shining, and Star Wars . It is a product of more than 800 years of musical transformation, finding purchase in a variety of musical environments, including the church, the concert hall, and the cinema. Based on a corpus of nearly 300 films, Hearing Death At the Movies models two new ways of thinking about the Dies Irae . First, it identifies three different versions of the melody, each of which signifies a different function of film music. Second, it traces the semantic shift of the Dies Irae from its religious roots to its secular perception as a symbol of death. This study of the most widely-used theme in film music history will change how you listen to movies.
Alex Ludwig is Associate Professor of Music at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.