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Description
Techno-horror is an electronic and industrially tinged approach to horror scoring and sound design that centers on the fear of technology—its systems, infrastructures, and machinic agency.
Musically, it fuses pounding techno pulse, metallic industrial textures, glitch artifacts, and brooding dark ambient atmospheres. Expect distorted synthesizers, machine-like rhythms, bitcrushed noise, modem/static artefacts, and claustrophobic drones that evoke faulty circuitry, surveillance, and rogue algorithms.
It is used both in films and games that portray haunted or malevolent technologies, as well as in standalone albums that dramatize techno-paranoia through sound.
Sources: Spotify, Wikipedia, Discogs, Rate Your Music, MusicBrainz, and other online sources
History
The sonic DNA of techno-horror was set in the late 1980s, when industrial music, early techno, and dark ambient converged with cyberpunk and body‑horror cinema. Japanese cyberpunk/horror works (e.g., Tetsuo: The Iron Man) and North American techno‑dystopias established a template of pounding drum machines, sheet‑metal percussion, and detuned synths that sounded like sentient machinery.
Across the 1990s, fear of networks, videotapes, and computers fed a wave of techno‑hauntings in film and J‑horror, while survival‑horror games popularized electronic/industrial scoring techniques. Producers blended glitch, granular processing, and bass pressure with minimal motifs, creating an aesthetic of corrupted signals and broken loops.
Streaming‑era anthologies, indie games, and darksynth-adjacent artists revived and expanded the palette: cinematic techno low‑end, modular synth noise, and hyper-detailed sound design now sit alongside sparse melodies and sub‑bass swells. Today, techno-horror functions as both a scoring language and a recording artist style for depicting data‑age dread, AI malevolence, and digital hauntings.
