This week is our fall break, but we still did a bit of learning in the area of life skills. Being October, I have a few scary movies whose scores I wanted to share with my girls…without showing them the entire movie.

Note: I never realized how much I Google: “Why is (movie title) rated R?” Followed by the thoughts, “Oh yeah. I totally forgot about that scene.”

This week, I’m sharing the scores to:

• The Silence of the Lambs
• The Shining
• Seven
• Game of Thrones (season 8, episode 3)

The track “Clarice” is my favorite on this soundtrack. It’s a perfectly dark theme for a character with a repressed darkness of her own. Clarice’s meetings with Hannibal Lector are my favorite scenes in the film. (I have a psych degree, and I considered a career in criminal psychochology!)

I am a huge fan of Stephen King, so it’s surprising that I consider this one of my favorite horror movies! The entire score is strange and haunting, and every track fits. The main title uses the “Dies Irae” segment from “Symphonie Phantastique” by Hector Berlioz. In “Dies Irae”, the bassoons hit their lowest notes, so the electronic rendition by Carlos & Elkind sounds amazing!

Hello again, Howard Shore! “Seven” was such a shocking and surprising movie. It was perfectly dark and mysterious. We studied this movie in one of my classes in college. The lighting, the music, the cinematography, the story, and the acting was in near-perfect harmony. The score itself is short compared to the popular songs that appear in the film.

The track “The Night King” is most likely the best thing to come out of season 8 of “Game of Thrones.” Music tended to play a character of its own in this show. “The Night King” was a simple piano piece in the episode “The Long Night” (episode 3). The track misleads the viewer as the events unfold in the episode. In the end, you’re basically saying, “Wait. What just happened?”