No composer has had as much impact on cinema as Bernard Herrmann. Even if you don’t know his name, you know his compositions. If you’re familiar with the staccato trills in the movie Pyscho as Vivian Leigh’s Marian Crane is about to meet her doom in the infamous shower sequence, then you know Bernard Herrmann.

Born in New York City in 1911, Herrmann began his career in 1934 when he became a staff conductor at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network. While working at CBS, Herrmann eventually met Orson Welles, with whom he collaborated on Welles’s Mercury Theater productions, including Welles’s notorious adapation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. After Welles’s success with the War of the Worlds production, Herrmann followed him to Hollywood where he worked on Welles’s first feature film Citizen Kane (1941) and later The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Establishing his name as a respected film composer in Hollywood, Herrmann worked on the movie The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), for which he won his first and only Oscar.

From there, Herrmann worked on various productions throughout the 1940s, including Jane Eyre (1944), Hangover Square (1945), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and Portrait of Jennie (1948). In 1951, Herrmann introduced electronic music into the American musical vernacular with his work in the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Using the Theremin, an electronic musical instrument created by Russian inventor Leon Theremin, Herrmann’s score created an otherworldly effect that perfectly complemented the film’s mood, atmosphere and theme.

During the 1950s, Herrmann’s collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock would yield his most memorable and lasting work. His first film with Hitchcock was 1955’s The Trouble With Harry, but his work on the film Vertigo (1958) realizes how closely Herrmann’s work is identified with Hitchcock’s visual cues. Haunting and romantic, the Vertigo film score, with its rising and falling melodies, captures the dizzying emotions of romantic obsession and desires. The scene in which Judy, as played by Kim Novak, is transformed into Jimmy Stewart’s dead lover, emerging as though out of death itself, is heightened by the thematic score, crescendoing Hitchcock’s theme of obsession and emotional control.

Herrmann’s later collaborations with Hitchcock include North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963), though with the latter Herrmann eschews a typical film score to use musique concrete techniques, such as tape loops and bird sounds, to create a soundtrack that relies on electronic sounds and silence to build the film’s suspense. But one film that is considered Herrmann’s most famous is his collaboration on the movie Psycho.

Released in 1960, Psycho was an unusual film in which the lead heroine is killed off in the first third of the movie, something that was never done before at that point in cinema. To match the film’s unsual storytelling techniques, Herrmann creates a score that delivers bone-chilling eeriness and fear to the film’s subject. As mentioned before, one of the most famous sequences in all of cinema occurs during the shower scene when the aforementioned heroine is stabbed to death by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Herrmann underscores the effect of well-timed music with the introduction of the screeching violins just as Bates pulls back the shower curtain, interrupting the natural sounds of falling water and the crinkling of the paper package Marion tears off a bar of soap. The eeriness of these common sounds builds on the suspense that is only climaxed by Herrmann’s score, creating a crescendo of horror that is shocking even in this day in age when gore replaces suspense in modern day fright flicks.

Herrmann’s collaboration with Hitchcock ended on the film Torn Curtain (1966) after they both disagreed over the pertinence of a soundtrack score during a key sequence in the film. Herrmann went on to work with other directors, particularly Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). During the 1970s, Herrmann collaborated on two of Brian de Palma’s early films Sisters (1973) and Obsession (1976), which might seem like a fitting collaboration since de Palma’s work has often been accused of “borrowing” themes and styles from Hitchcock.

Herrmann’s last collaboration, though, was with Martin Scorsese’s seminal film Taxi Driver. His score, like Vertigo, teased out the film’s themes of obsession, madness, and loneliness. But unlike Vertigo, which was lush and classical in its orientation, the score for Taxi Driver took Herrmann down a jazzier route, playing on the soundtrack of New York City in the 1970s. Sophisticated and haunting, the score is much brassier and percussive, using the intensity of the rhythm to underscore the hustle and bustle of New York’s mean streets. As with many of Herrmann’s previous collaborations, his soundtrack identifies and defines the movie’s themes, mood and atmosphere.

After completing the film score to Taxi Driver, Herrmann died of heart failure on December 24, 1975, capping off an illustrious career as a film composer. Herrmann’s music, recognizable, lush, haunting, and tragic, heightened the film going experience and created memorable and lasting moments in the history of cinema.