From The Shining to
The Lion King, the haunting tones of Dies Irae crop up in many TV shows and films. How did it become ubiquitous?
Who is the biggest player in movie soundtracks? How about some moody 13th-century monks? This at least appears to be the wisdom coming out of the kookier corners of the film soundtrack community. A few weeks ago, the
British cinematic composer Daniel Pemberton was reading online comments surrounding his score for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. “One said: ‘This is Dies Irae,’” Pemberton recalls, with some sense of disbelief. “I was like: ‘Well, is it?’”
Maybe. According to the geeks on the internet, this chilling, antique leitmotif is everywhere. Dies Irae is a medieval Latin poem about the Last Judgment, set to
music for Catholic requiems or funeral masses. The best-known part, which may qualify as one of the world’s earliest earworms, is a spooky, descending four-note sequence, over which the monks chant the words “dies irae”; that’s Latin for Judgment Day, or more directly “the day of wrath”. That might not sound like box-office dynamite, but the tune has been reused for centuries since appearing in requiems by Mozart and Verdi. According to online commentators such as Vox’s Bridgett Henwood, composer, arranger and blogger Brian LaGuardia and HowStuffWorks’ The Soundtrack Show podcast, it can be heard in many hit movies.