The Creepy 13th-Century Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Introduction to “Dies Irae”

The num­ber of icon­ic scenes in cin­e­ma his­to­ry can and do fill text­books hun­dreds of pages long. Doubt­less most of us have seen enough of these scenes to know the basic gram­mar of fea­ture film, and to rec­og­nize the hun­dreds of ref­er­ences in movies and TV to clas­sic cuts and com­po­si­tions from Hitch­cock, Kubrick, or Kuro­sawa.

Visu­al and nar­ra­tive allu­sions might leap out at us, but music tends to work in sub­tler ways, prompt­ing emo­tion­al respons­es with­out engag­ing the parts of our brain that make com­par­isons. Case in point, the videos here from Vox and Berklee Col­lege of Music pro­fes­sor Alex Lud­wig demon­strate the wide­spread use of a musi­cal motif of four notes from the “Dies Irae,” or “day of wrath,” a 13th cen­tu­ry Gre­go­ri­an requiem, or Catholic mass tra­di­tion­al­ly sung at funer­als.

Of course, we know these notes from the icon­ic, oft-par­o­died Amadeus scene of Mozart com­pos­ing the “Dies Irae” move­ment of his Requiem in his sickbed, as ulti­mate fren­e­my Salieri furi­ous­ly tran­scribes. Once you hear the mag­is­te­ri­al­ly omi­nous sequence of notes, you might imme­di­ate­ly think of Wendy Car­los’ themes for The Shin­ing and A Clock­work Orange. But did you notice these four notes in Disney’s The Lion King, Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, or It’s a Won­der­ful Life?

What about Har­ry Pot­ter and the Cham­ber of Secrets, Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind, or Home Alone? Both Vox and Lud­wig show how the “dies irae” theme appears over and over, cue­ing us to per­il or tragedy ahead, ori­ent­ing us to the ter­ror and unease we see onscreen. For almost 800 years, these four notes have sig­ni­fied all of the above for Catholic Europe, as well as, Vox notes, sound­track­ing the sup­posed future day when “God will judge the liv­ing and the dead and send them to heav­en or hell.”

The “dies irae” has per­me­at­ed nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma for almost as long as film has exist­ed. The old­est exam­ple in Ludwig’s com­pi­la­tion comes from a 1927 score writ­ten by Got­tfried Hup­pertz for Fritz Lang’s silent Metrop­o­lis. Lud­wig also brings his musi­co­log­i­cal exper­tise to bear in Vox’s explo­ration of “dies irae” ref­er­ences. He sums up the net effect as cre­at­ing a “sense of dread,” bestowed upon moder­ni­ty by hun­dreds of years of Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy as expressed in music.

Film com­posers were only the lat­est to pick up the cul­tur­al thread of fear and threat in “Dies Irae.” Their work stands on the shoul­ders of Mozart and lat­er com­posers like Hec­tor Berlioz, who lift­ed the melody in his 1830 Sym­phonie fan­tas­tique to tell a sto­ry of obses­sive love and mur­der, and a night­mare of a witch’s sab­bath. Lat­er came Franz Liszt’s 1849 Toten­tanz (Dance of the Dead) and Giuseppe Verdi’s 1874 Mes­sa da Requiem, a very rec­og­niz­able piece of music that has made its appear­ance in no small num­ber of movies, TV shows, com­mer­cials, and temp scores.

Vox and Lud­wig show the “dies irae” phe­nom­e­non in film to be a slow cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion from the ornate, sacred pomp of medieval Catholic rites to the ornate, sec­u­lar pomp of Hol­ly­wood film pro­duc­tion, by way of clas­si­cal com­posers who seized on the theme’s “sense of dread” but remained at least ambiva­lent about hap­py end­ings on the day of wrath.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

All of the Music from Mar­tin Scorsese’s Movies: Lis­ten to a 326-Track, 20-Hour Playlist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness