Sound / Music of Psychological thrillers

Music

• Throughout the film usually the music is eery, building up fear and tension in scenes accompanying the mood played by the characters in the scene. As it is a psychological thriller, this uneasy music will co-operate well as mystery and unease is the common mood in these type of films.
• The music can change from scene to scene connoting emotions and setting the feel or mood of the scene. A happier scene may be accompanied by an upbeat background track with major chords, a sadder scene having a slowly paced track probably played by piano with lots of minor chords in, connoting the slow and sad feeling. A tense scene, where suspence is building up may start with he music being slowly paces, picking up the pace as the scene gets tenser, adding more instruments such as high pitched violins played then adding lower sounding cello's layering different instruments to create a sense of chaos and  creating a suspenseful and fearful soundtrack much like the one played behind the shower attack scene in Psycho.

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Sound

• Silence can be cleverly used in Psychological thrillers, making the audience tense and believing something bad may happen as they now have heightened senses due to the silence allowing them to concentrate on other parts of the scene.
• Diegetic sound is where sounds are heard and sourced from somewhere within the scene such as; a glass being put down on a table, clinking, A creeking door opening, or a window being smashed. These sounds add to the realism of the film as we can hear the within the scene.
• Non- diegetic sound is where the source of the sound cannot be heard from the scene on screen, such as a narrators commentary, sound effects added for dramatic effect or mood music. This can be seen in pyschological films when we see a character on screen not saying anything but can hear their thoughts, showing the audience what they are thinking, or a character reading a letter so the audience can have hearing aid keeping the realism in the film whilst also being on that boundary of un- realistic editing.