‘Psycho’ can easily be said to have one of the most iconic scores in film history– even if you haven’t seen the film, you will have heard the screeching strings from the shower-murder scene. Herrmann scored 7 films for director Alfred Hitchcock in total, with Psycho being the 6th in their collaboration, and wrote the music for other epics such as Citizen Kane, The Twilight Zone and The War of the Worlds. The score for Psycho was written only for the string section of an orchestra, with the strings being muted throughout the film (apart from in the iconic scene) which was to aid in the film’s stark, dissonant, claustrophobic feeling. The music contains influences from composers like Bartok, Debussy and Stravinski, and is extremely effective in conveying the thing Herrmann most wanted it to: “terror”.