If you were asked to pick the most unsettling television theme song ever composed, what would you choose? In the event that your answer ends up being Unsolved Mysteries, literally nobody on the planet is gonna have an argument for you. Not one person. However, if you’re in the rare position of not knowing what we’re talking about right now, go ahead and listen to the terrifying intro music below—and, for Christ’s sake, turn on a light first.
Composers Gary Malkin and Michael Boyd wrote that haunting little tune in the 1980s, and it has been striking fear into the hearts of everyone who’s listened to it since. Believe it or not, even Malkin himself wasn’t immune to the song’s chilling effects. In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Malkin recalled that after spending countless hours on the score and watching reenactments of murders and abductions, he couldn’t get the melody out of his head. “I was destroyed for weeks,” he revealed, “I had horrible nightmares.”
Why the ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Theme Still Gives You the Creeps
But Malkin was far from the only one his music gave the creeps to. As he tells it, the folks at NBC had to deal with quite a few complaints over the years regarding kids being freaked out by the show’s opening credits. “We used to get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘Could you please change the theme music? Our children are terrified of it,’” Malkin remembered.
As for what makes the Unsolved Mysteries theme so eerie, Malkin explained that he and Boyd used an interval called the tritone (a.k.a. the devil’s interval), a dissonant combination that, according to musicologist Neil Lerner, creates a sense of tension, ambiguity, and instability. Evidently, religious songs from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance avoided the tritone because it made people feel uneasy. Malkin and Boyd were also inspired by the sinister music in earlier horror movies, such as John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme.
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