Hearing Death at the Movies: Film Music and the Long History of the Dies Irae

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...