Hearing Death at the Movies

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.