Johann Sebastian Bach would have been baffled to learn that the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 has come to be associated with madmen, mayhem, and the macabre. (Assuming he even wrote it at all, which is a whole 'nother scary story!) We have movies like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Black Cat (1934) to thank for the 'creepification' of an otherwise innocuous work for organ.

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Music from The Twilight Zone by Marius Constant and Bernard Herrmann

Watching The Twilight Zone as a youngster probably scarred me for life, populated as it was with doctors and nurses with misshapen faces, planets moving closer to the sun, and children falling through walls into another dimension. Marius Constant's eerie theme still makes me shiver. The harp-infused main title from Season One, penned by Bernard Herrmann, still creeps me out as well, as does his score from the episode which terrified me most as a child, "Eye of the Beholder." I'm over it now. No, really.

Adagio from "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta" by Béla Bartók

Bartok was not a film composer, and I'd imagine that a crazed author with an axe at a deserted hotel was the furthest thing from his mind while composing this work for conductor Paul Sacher. Enter director Stanley Kubrick, who always knew what he wanted in a score, and used the adagio movement to chilling effect in The Shining.

"The Water Goblin" by Antonin Dvorak

The first time I played this piece on the air, I looked up some background information on it, and was aghast at the gruesome 'fairy tale' behind the piece: a young girl is married by force to the ruler of the water kingdom, and is miserable. Not even the love she feels for their child can make her happy. She begs to be allowed to go home to visit her mother. The goblin agrees, on the condition that she leave the child behind. Her mother locks her in the house, and the enraged goblin takes revenge by killing his own child and leaving the corpse on the girl's doorstep--hewn in two.

Psycho by Bernard Herrmann

From the propulsive opening title music to the famous shower scene, Bernard Herrmann matched Hitchcock's genius with every note of his strings-only score. Can you imagine the movie without the shrieking violins as Marion Crane meets her demise in the shower? Hitchcock apparently could; he instructed Herrmann not to score that scene, as he envisioned the murder happening without the benefit of a soundtrack.

"Der Erlkönig" by Franz Schubert

A late night ride, a father racing to save his sick child, who by the way can see and hear something the father cannot...the stuff of nightmares. Franz Schubert created an almost cinematic setting of Goethe's poem with a hectic tempo and rising panic. What could have been melodramatic is frankly terrifying.

"Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia," by Michel Beheim

In 1463, Michel Beheim entertained Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich III with a thousand-line poem bearing that ponderous name. The text relates Vlad Dracula's heinous crimes against humanity in detail, like skinning his victims, impaling them, or boiling them alive. There's no mention of him actually drinking the blood of his victims in the poem, just that he liked to wash his hands in it, which is far better, right?

"Funeral March of a Marionette" by Charles Gounod

Gounod's little march was originally part of a "Suite Burlesque" about a marionette who dies in a duel, but for a certain generation of TV-watchers, it's inextricably linked to thrilling and mysterious tales thanks to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He even named it one of his desert island recordings in a 1959 BBC broadcast of Desert Island Discs.