In 1975, a young untested film director wrapped production on his first major studio film. He was feeling hopeless because although the script called for several shots of a giant shark, the mechanical creature created by his art department failed through most of the shoot. And because most of the principal photography was done on the ocean, the overages were massive.
Going into post-production, he didn’t have the shots to show the shark in a literal sense, so he was forced to merely suggest the shark through great acting performances by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss; plus shots of the ocean…plus 
music composed by John Williams. Because the project had drifted so far away from the original plan, Steven Spielberg thought his career was toast.
In just 78 days, Jaws overtook The Godfather as the highest-grossing film in North America. It become the first film in history to earn over $100 million in the US. Almost thirty years after its release, Jaws was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
If you’re a creative person who needs to get that first blockbuster movie under your belt without spending a lot of money, consider the horror/suspense genre; because your most valuable asset as a story teller is the audience’s fear of what they can’t see. That doesn’t cost you a dime.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) – shot for less than $60,000 – went to gross $250 million at the box office. At no point during that film does any violent act occur on screen. Everything is suggested, implied and heard.
“You’re guaranteed to make money doing a horror movie,” explains Craig Miller, film producer and chair of the Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment 
Advisory Commission. “Lots of directors will start with a horror film because they have an audience, have a niche, and you can make them relatively inexpensively. Alfred Hitchcock made a career of never actually showing the horror. A talented filmmaker can scare the bejesus out of their audience with great acting, great editing and of course great music.”
So, dear filmmaker, MusicRevolution is proud to offer you this frightening collection of horror/terror tracks that will have your viewers chewing their nails….not because Halloween is right around the corner, but rather because your audience thinks it’s right around the corner waiting with a bloody axe.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_(film)
https://shofur.com/blog/craig-miller-on-breaking-into-georgias-movie-industry/
https://soundcloud.com/shofur/film-producer-craig-miller-on-breaking-into-georgias-booming-movie-industry
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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace with over 50,000 tracks online where media producers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses and other music buyers can license high-quality, affordable royalty-free music from an online community of musicians. mbielenberg@musicrevolution.com. 
