Charles Bernstein - A Nightmare on Elm Street (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1984)

Synth-fueled horror perfection. There's some stuff that kinda sounds like guitars but I'm pretty sure it's just more synthesizer magic. At this point in the franchise, Freddy Krueger hadn't really started incorporating pun-filled one-liners into his murder game, making it easily the most 'serious' entry in the series. It also contains arguably its two most iconic death sequences -- the one where slash marks start spontaneously appearing all over Tina while she spins around in mid-air, and the one where Johnny Depp's character gets swallowed by his own bed and transformed into a physics-defying cascade of carnage. Plus, the bathtub scene. With all this on-screen excellence, it's easy to forget, or not even realize in the first place, how great the soundtrack is.

Track listing:
1. Prologue
2. Main Title
3. Laying the Traps
4. Dream Attack
5. Rod Hanged, Night Stalking
6. Jail Cell
7. Confrontation
8. Sleep Clinic
9. Terror in the Tub
10. No Escape
11. School Horror, Stay Awake
12. Lurking
13. Telephone Terror
14. Fountain of Blood
15. Evil Freddy
16. Final Search
17. Run, Nancy

I could be bounded in a nutshell
And count myself a king of infinite space
Were it not that I have bad dreams

More 80s horror:

John Harrison -
Creepshow (1982)

John Carpenter & Alan Howarth -
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1989)