The alliance of music and science fiction film reached new heights in the 1980s, carving out a distinct and influential auditory identity for the genre. New technologies like the synthesizer permitted composers to create an attractive new sound that easily captured the futuristic essence of science fiction. And while a number of the films from this period feature popular songs as part of their soundtracks, those same movies also boast instrumental scores that not only serve as effective auditory cues to accompany and complement the film’s visuals but also create a number of memorable, atmospheric tunes that many fans can still recall several decades later.
These soundscapes left a deep and lasting impression on me. I remember quite clearly my first time watching Blade Runner. The rain-drenched, neon-lit streets pulsed to the rhythm of Vangelis’s powerful electronic score.
But it wasn’t merely the visuals that induced me to lose myself into dystopian Los Angeles, nor was it simply my knowledge of what I was supposed to feel, given the unfolding narrative. The music, the soundtrack, the score completely and totally enwrapped me. I can’t think of a better adjective than that: enwrapped.
The sense of feeling “enwrapped” serves to protect and pull in every vulnerable sense; visually, it serves to border and posture the images in our imaginations, and it audibly enchants the ears in such a way that we grasp tightly to the integrated melodic story unfolding before us.
Without a doubt, the soundtrack for Blade Runner is the most significant and favored score of my life. For many, it is a true classic in the history of cinema.
Never-up-to-that-time and never-since-has-the-blend of orchestral elements and lush synthesizer melodies seemed so harmonious and humanistic, even in a story depicted just after the 2019 that seemed so futuristic on the film’s 1982 release. Maybe it’s because, in the end, the story (and the score) is so incredibly wired to the question of what it means to be human. Or maybe it’s because there’s no way Vangelis’s music felt anything other than “real” in an “artificial” world, unlike any other score before or since.
But Blade Runner wasn’t the only film to work its auditory magic. Tron, with its dazzling use of computer-generated imagery, found a strange and wonderful aural partner in the score by Wendy Carlos, a blend of synthesizers and orchestral sounds that reflected the digital frontier the film sought to explore. Carlos’s work, famous for its use of the Moog synthesizer, created a sound that was at once both alien and familiar—ideal for a film about being pulled into a virtual world.
Without the pulse of the synthesizer as a kind of heartbeat for the light cycles, the glowing circuitry, and the relentless pursuit of the MCP, it would be difficult to imagine the abstract world of Tron as a place where the synthetic and the organic blurred into one. Sci-fi films from the 1980s had soundtracks that did something unusual: they weren’t simple musical companions to the stories, but instead became characters themselves. Because they immersed audiences in the emotional contours of the films, the soundtracks also encouraged viewers to experience the stories told in the films.
And in the case of “Escape from New York,” it is the music that not only commands attention but also instills the essence of the anarchic dystopia that John Carpenter imagined for Manhattan on a gritty, decaying island. Carpenter’s minimalist score for Escape from New York used synthesizers to evoke feelings of isolation and tension. It had a pulsing quality that was almost like two very thick bass lines that perpetually seemed to be in duress, accompanied by simple, repeated melodies that made the music seem to have no other choice but to keep going and going and going, much like Snake Plissken himself.
This was “the music of the city,” and unlike the tonally rich, nearly romantic soundtrack for Blade Runner, which came out just a year later, Carpenter’s score was rough, raw, and “mechanical” in the best possible way—a sound world that seemed perfect for a future in which society had broken down. What makes these soundtracks so potent? Their capacity to conjure up a powerful location and mood.
For me, the score of Tron and Escape from New York is a visceral reminder of the ’80s. I can step back into those worlds because they hold a certain atmosphere that blends nostalgia and timelessness. These soundtracks remind us of the past in a way that feels present, as if they’re scoring some moment in our near future.
Part of their power comes, as I said, from synthesizers, which hold an almost-indefinable quality that’s unlike anything else in electronic music. The soundtracks from that period also resonate because they represent an era of experimentation, when composers and filmmakers were not afraid to extend the limits of what film music could do. The synthesizer was, in many ways, the perfect instrument for that era—a tool that, like the emerging computer technology of the time, was new, unpredictable, and full of potential.
It could produce sounds that had never before been heard, sounds that were the musical equivalent of a new frontier. This innovative spirit matched the themes of the films themselves, where characters were dealing with the not-so-implausible outcomes of artificial intelligence, space exploration, and virtual reality. When I first encountered the otherworldly sounds of these scores, I was filled with a sense of awesomeness.
The music offered a glimpse into a not-too-distant future that had been imagined by the filmmakers. Now I realize that these soundtracks serve double duty. They work like a direct link to the past, reminding us of not only the films but also of a time we might have forgotten.
After all, the past is something we have in common. And the soundtracks remind us that the films held a certain promise. Whether or not the promise was delivered in the films themselves, it had something to do with the soundtracks that make the reminder seem slightly more mysterious.
Today’s science-fiction films often attempt to recapture the magic of their iconic predecessors’ soundtracks but achieve far less in the way of impact. Composers like Hans Zimmer or Jóhann Jóhannsson work at the adjacent to the level of “great,” and definitely often veer into the realm of “beautiful”: they craft, with an ensemble of electric and acoustic instruments, seductive and amazing film scores. Yet their art seems to have forgotten some of the alchemy that made a lot of those 1980s soundtracks work on a level far beyond the merely “musical”—and, in the case of the Scandroid arrangements, the alchemical magic seems to have been recaptured.
This disparity is not limited to difference in musical style; it concerns how the soundtracks associate with the story’s world. In the 1980s, synth scores seemed to be part of the film’s very fabric, and narrative and soundscape were blurred into one. Today, it often seems like the music is just placed on top of the film, providing atmosphere but not really integrating into the story.
The way Vangelis’s music in Blade Runner or Carlos’s in Tron extended into the world of the film, and was an aural reflection of the cities and landscapes they portrayed, is something we don’t see much of nowadays. I’m not claiming that sci-fi scores these days don’t have merit. Still, I think they have become much safer and more commonly acceptable as a result of polished production values and the composers’ good sense of what works within the narrative confines of a film.
The scores of the past 30 years seem to play it safe and serve the picture rather than take Narration 101 “Risky Play” class assignments and create a mood that immerses you in the otherworldly aspects of a given film’s narrative. And the I-don’t-need-to-play-it-safe approach of the film scorers in the ’70s and ’80s doesn’t seem to be a contemporary fear we need to overcome to feel the way the past wallowed in the future—hence the appearance of “The Future Was Better Back Then.”
The nostalgic draw of ’80s sci-fi film soundtracks lies in their ability to transport one to a time when the future was still a tantalizingly unknown frontier—when computers were ciphering enigmas and the digital revolution was just an idea waiting to happen. They hint at an epoch when the human adventure in science fiction was really an adventure in exploring the outer limits of our own potential, as much about the inner workings of the human soul as it was about the infantry of the army of the damned besieging an outpost at the edge of the solar system.
Hearing these scores in the present day is like opening an old sci-fi mag full of those misjudged but good-natured prophecies that are nonetheless a bit of a slap in the face to our imaginations. It’s impossible to not view the 1980s’ image of the future as inextricably linked with the era’s specific musical soundscapes. These tracks not only provided the perfect accompaniment to the decade’s movies but also managed to help define the culture’s collective vision of what the future would be like.
“A sonorous sign of the decade’s embrace of technology, the synthesizer became both a symbol of techno-optimism and a soundtrack for existential uncertainty,” writes critic Jim Emerson, who adds that the very fact that some future cultures/civilizations deemed the synth soundtrack-appropriate has led to today’s (and likely tomorrow’s) visually dynamic aesthetic. These scores have sustained themselves because of their emotional presence. People often think of the synthesizer as a cold, mechanical instrument; but, when it’s in the hands of really good composers, like Vangelis and Wendy Carlos, it becomes a tool for something that is really unique to electronic music and that Eno once identified as the “areas of mood and atmosphere.” The synth chords that open Blade Runner, for instance, are thick with melancholy and longing.
They’re almost a shorthand for what the plot is about—how human beings seem to have such a hard time being human. And those chords do it without words.
—M.
Joshua Cauller
The soundtracks embody the dual qualities of optimism and fear that characterized our era. They resonate with us today because they express something that is both universal and timeless: the tension between hope and despair. Among the handful of synth scores from the 1980s that have achieved classic-status, Wendy Carlos’s score for the 1982 film Tron is probably the most well-regarded.
Carlos’s work, however, must be measured alongside a more sinister score by John Carpenter for another 1982 film: Escape from New York. Both scores represent two opposing sides of the tension-riddled coin of 1980s American society. And they both do so while embodying a perfectly realized aesthetic that remains unmatched and most definitely unrepeated within the synth scores of today.
These motifs hold modern-day relevance because they echo our own intricate ties with technology. As we move into the era of the smartphone, the AI, and the internet, we find ourselves with a society that is ostensibly more connected than ever and yet feeling more alone. The ’80s soundtracks are a reminder of this principal conflict; they’ve been hashing it out for decades.
There’s the essence of a time when we were looking toward the future with a combination of hope, dread, and maybe even a little loathing—certainly a feeling a little more relevant than ever, in the dawn of a new AI age, and the rumored return of virtual reality. Filmmakers today are attempting to recreate the unique mood and atmosphere of the soundtracks to the science fiction films of the 1980s. The nostalgia for those far-out scores, composed largely with synthesizers, is now part of the something called “synthwave,” a fledgling genre in the electronic music world that has quite a few roots in those ’80s sci-fi soundtracks.
Still, it seems a little daring to say that some of today’s composers might well be synthwaving their way to pasting together a new sci-fi soundtrack. After all, come 2020, a sound that was only ten years old could already have been seen as something nostalgically futuristic.
A significant difficulty is that numerous contemporary soundtracks depend too much on nostalgia and pay too little homage to the original scores’ innovative spirits.
For instance, the music for Stranger Things does quite well in using synthesizers to form that eerie, nostalgic feel. But just listen to it and try to tell me it isn’t also a bit of a nod back to the past, with a side of what, in some musical circles, is now being called the “current synth revival.” In contrast, I would argue that a truly great ’80s soundtrack didn’t merely emulate and play around with past sounds. Instead, it reached deep into the toolbox of available technologies to craft some startling ahead-of-their-time moments that now smell more like futurism than “nostalgia.”
This isn’t to suggest that today’s composers can’t create scores with the weight and presence of those made in the past.
Films like Annihilation and Arrival have shown that mainstream science fiction can still use musical accompaniment to investigate profound concepts and elicit nuanced emotions. But the soundtracks of the ’80s seem to stand apart in some essential way. They evoke a time when the not-quite-here world of tomorrow felt both electrifyingly thrilling and awesome in a way that could only be expressed with…the synthesizer.
These soundtracks remind me of why I initially fell in love with sci-fi. They take me back to the original moments of wonder when I was a filmgoer and felt like I was being reintroduced to a genre that was both entirely new and astonishingly familiar. And I think that’s what makes these soundtracks so effective.
Listening to the opening notes of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score or the driving rhythm of Carpenter’s Escape from New York, I feel like I’m stepping into a digital dystopia—a place that’s as much in my imagination as it is on the screen. And perhaps that’s what these soundtracks are really about.
The power of sci-fi isn’t really in its ability to show us new worlds; it’s in the way it makes us feel like we’ve never left those worlds, even for a moment.
More than anything, ’80s sci-fi soundtracks are about contradictions. They’re about portraying visions of the future that are full of both technological wonder and dread. They’re about how technology can both help us and threaten us.
They’re about how we can always expect the kind of music that’s best to accompany a space battle, a robot uprising, or a scene in which a human struggles to hold on to his or her sanity in the face of a technological storm. We expect these soundtracks to blow our minds, and more often than not, they do. Even when they don’t, they’re still influential because of the heavy implication that these stories and their accompanying scores are making music for a future that will always be ours to shape.
Ultimately, ’80s sci-fi film scores bequeathed to us a strong connection to that collective vision of the future. They took us back to the still-recent days of the synthesizer’s birth, when its many electronic sounds were seen as new and filled with potential. They made us think about what a world of computers and digital signals might be like long before the Internet was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.
And as a nice bonus, many of these soundtracks are just plain enjoyable to listen to.
