I understand that a standard response may be "DISSONANCE" or "ATONALITY" or "TRITONES AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH" but atonality and/or dissonance does not necessarily make music scary. How many people today would consider Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to be particularly scary or dark? Not many, I would think. In fact, the music is fairly light-hearted, at least in my opinion. I am not sure if particular scales, intervals, and tones are what scare people, ranging from person. Without a doubt this is highly subjective, but generally people - people who are not weird like me - tend to shy away from lower tempos and lower pitches. Higher tempos and pitches tend to predominately appear in pop songs, and happy Yoshi Island themes. For example, Koji Kondo's "Flower Garden" theme from the mentioned game is at the standard tempo of 120 bpm and it also features pleasing upbeat music. At the same time the Haunted Mansion theme from Super Mario 64, also by Kondo, is an upbeat track, but it is slightly lower in tone, and...therefore creepier? The theme also betrays our expectations for a haunted house - those types of themes tend to be slower - though we cannot simply assume that such a betrayal is scary.
From my observations, songs that are darker in sound are scarier than slower songs, but generally dark-sounding songs are also slow, hence my note about the Haunted Mansion theme. To provide another example, consider the "Laura Palmer" theme from Twin Peaks, which consists mainly of a synthesizer buried in the low register, playing slowly, but still making a clear melody; this piece is still scary to an extent, but the sense of melody gives it emotion to the reader, preventing it from simply being a bizarre, impossible-to-understand atonal mess. As the piano enters the piece seems less dark, transgressing that label and becoming emotional. A detectable melody, if not completely tonal, is comforting and gives a sense of connection with even very dark in sound pieces. This suggests a fairly universal standard for a "not-scary" piece.
Sad music is not the same as dark music, generally, unless visuals add to a sad feeling, generally. Music deep in the low register is generally not perceived as sad, rather it is seen as emotionless. A seeming wall of noise or lack of musical melody is the scariest aspect, not the low tempo or the low pitch. These are contributing factors generally, but not the primary reason.
Orchestration plays another role: the electric guitar and piano are seen as being less apt for scary music, simply disjunct music. Weirdness certainly plays a role in being scary, but synthesizer and strings seem to simply have the greatest capacity for making that kind of music. Percussion can also create an unsettling feel, yet the lack thereof is also unsettling.
On a final note, is "weird" equivalent to unsettling or scary? To me, eerie is not quite scary, and is rather weird in an elegant manner. Gyorgy Ligeti's piece is high pitched, but also slow, though I see people finding it scary due to the focus on singing in a substandard way; the bunching of notes and voices makes it all the more bizarre and hard to accept. Taking the piece apart and examining what makes it alien is hard, even though on the surface it is a very unique piece. I mean, Stanley Kubrick put it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but can we just use something that came out afterwards to explain the piece. Where a music is played can certainly add to its scariness, but the tracks that truly scare people are not simply situational. I think that music that is truly scary (in the eyes of the beholder, obviously) transgresses situation.
But I don't know everything. What do you guys think about this?
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