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5 Truly Terrifying Songs

1. Carolina Buddies, "The Murder of the Lawson Family"

As this murder ballad became a folk standard, recorded most famously by the Stanley Brothers in 1956, the events it relates became the stuff of hazy legend. But when this struggling three-man string band first sang these lyrics in 1930, their story of Charlie Lawson was ripped from the headlines. Just a year earlier, on Christmas Day, Lawson murdered his wife and six of his seven children, rested their heads on pillows of stone, and then killed himself. (The seventh child was out on an errand at the time.) The Buddies sing with a cool Appalachian resignation, acknowledging but not sensationalizing the violent terror lurking in everyday life. The idea that a man might one day snap without explanation and destroy his family and himself feels all the more tragic set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, suggesting as it does that not even family life could offer refuge from the economic despair of the age. 

2. Louvin Brothers, "Knoxville Girl"

Maybe the best-known Appalachian murder ballad is the first-person account of an apparently otherwise ordinary Tennessee fellow who inexplicably takes time out from a stroll with his sweetheart to beat her to death with a stick despite her heartbreaking protests. On the recording, they made for their 1956 debut LP Tragic Songs of Life (later a country hit), Ira and Charlie Louvin harmonize with grim rectitude over a brisk, easy waltz rhythm that adds to the fatalism of its crisply moralistic ending, with the violent creep wasting away in prison. (Though really, the murderer doesn't sound any more repentant in jail then he had when he was dumping his slain gal in the river then heading home to bed.) First recorded in its recognizable modern form in the 1920s, "Knoxville Girl" in fact drew from material that had been floating around for centuries, maybe traceable back to a real-life 17th Century killing in Wittam, England. Over the years, the titular victim hailed from a variety of towns – from Oxford, England to Wexford, Ireland – which suggests, terrifyingly enough, that just about every locale had at least one bloodthirsty woman-slayer to be sung about.

3. Krzystof Penderecki, "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" 

Music scholars call this trailblazing piece of 20th Century classical music an exemplary use of "sonorism"– but this dark cloud for 52 strings is more simply described as controlled anarchy. Instruments are smacked, bows are sawed across places bows weren't intended, and the entire orchestra hums like a swarm of angry bees. Naturally, the sound of the Polish composer has become shorthand for the tense and psychologically suffocating in the film: Both The Shining and Children of Men use the piece; and his music informed Jonny Greenwood's score to There Will Be Blood and Mica Levi's score to Under the Skin. "For some pieces, like the 'Threnody,' I prefer young people to perform it because they are still open to learning," Penderecki told Resident Advisor. "Some notation that I invented at that time is now common, but there are still some special techniques, different types of vibrato, playing on the tailpiece of the bridge, playing directly behind the bridge. These things are unusual, even after 50 years. With so-called normal symphony orchestras, sometimes I refuse to have this piece in the program because it takes too much rehearsal. Some older orchestra musicians don't want to learn anything new.

4. György Ligeti, "Volumina for Organ"

Hungarian composer György Ligeti worked with clusters of sound, creating a space-filling blur of chaos and movement. His Volumina, a piece for solo organ, begins with the performer's forearms across the keys – infamously causing the motor of the Göteborg organ to catch on fire. Though the piece is more about "colors" than notes, "Volumina" is made remarkably anxious thanks to its long passages of dissonance and duration that hovers somewhere north or south of the 15-minute mark.

5. The Doors, "The End"

Clocking in at nearly 12 minutes, Jim Morrison's epic "The End" is a bad trip that builds up to an insane, surprising end. The psychedelic rock epic has widely been interpreted as a goodbye to childhood innocence, and Morrison has said as much in interviews. It begins calmly, with the singer bidding adieu to his only friend, the end, before taking a lyrical tailspin into wilder verses, begging the listener to "ride the snake" and "ride the highway west." The final section is done as a spoken word narrative retelling the story of Oedipus, with the narrator telling his father that he wants to kill him and telling his mother he wants to have sex with her, before devolving into a flurry of chaotic "fuck"s. "The End" was developed during the group's tenure as the house band at Whisky a Go-Go when one night after Morrison had dropped acid, he improvised the song's tumultuous ending. They were fired the next day.