What's the Deal with Soundtrack Albums?: Metal Music and the Customized Aesthetics of Contemporary Horror

This essay argues that film music functions not only as a cross-promotional medium for marketing movies and licensed recordings, but also as a key site for effectively managing and containing processes of consumption. Heavy metal music is deployed in horror films like Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003) to interpellate particular niche audiences and taste communities. Thus, soundtrack albums reveal a fundamental assumption within media firms that a manageable relationship between niche formats and consumer tastes exists to be exploited.