Goblin are in this archive for the scores. The group is an Italian progressive-rock band, and the progressive-rock catalogue exists, but the reason the name carries beyond its own scene is the run of horror soundtracks written for Dario Argento across the second half of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Those scores, and the Romero Dawn of the Dead work alongside them, are a founding document of the modern horror-score idiom; the later synth-horror lineage that the archive also files under John Carpenter runs partly through Goblin.
The group began as a progressive-rock band. Between 1972 and 1973, Claudio Simonetti on keyboards and Massimo Morante on guitar, with Fabio Pignatelli on bass and Walter Martino on drums, recorded demos under the name Oliver. A trip to London brought brief interest from the Yes producer Eddy Offord; the project returned to Italy, recorded an album as Cherry Five, and then took the name Goblin during the sessions that made it. That session was Profondo Rosso.
Argento had commissioned a score from the jazz composer Giorgio Gaslini. When that score was set aside, the young rock group was brought in to rewrite and record much of the music at speed. The result, a driving theme built on harpsichord-like keyboard and rock rhythm, became a hit in Italy and gave the band its identity. The 1975 Cinevox release was the first record to carry the Goblin name. It established the template for what followed: a rock group, not an orchestra, scoring horror, with the performed energy of a band rather than the smoothness of studio film music.
The studio album Roller followed in 1976, made between scores; some of its material later served Romero\'s Martin. But the score that fixed the group\'s reputation is Suspiria in 1977. Written for Argento\'s film about a witch coven hidden inside a German dance academy, the music is built on bouzouki (Morante), Mellotron, bells, tabla, tuned and untuned percussion, and a whispered-and-hissed vocal layer that names the coven under the melody. The main theme is one of the most recognised pieces of music in horror cinema. It is the work most often called the group\'s masterpiece, and it is the clearest case of the Goblin method: progressive-rock craft, odd metres, an unusual instrumental palette, turned toward dread rather than display.
The second cornerstone is the score for George A. Romero\'s Dawn of the Dead (1978), which Argento co-produced and re-edited for European release as Zombi. Goblin\'s cues, propulsive and repetitive in a way that sits close to the motorik pulse of the German groups the archive files elsewhere, run through the European cut and gave the film much of its menace. Between Suspiria and Zombi, the group\'s horror reputation was set.
Morante and Simonetti began solo careers in 1978, and the group\'s founding phase wound down. There was a partial reunion for Argento\'s Tenebrae in 1982, credited to Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante rather than to Goblin as a band; its pulsing main theme was later sampled by the French duo Justice on the 2007 album Cross, a small sign of how far the group\'s sound travelled. Further Argento work followed in pieces, including Phenomena (1985); the last collaboration with Argento was Sleepless in 2001.
From 2000 onward the name proliferated. Reunions and offshoots have run under several banners, among them New Goblin, Goblin Rebirth, and Claudio Simonetti\'s Goblin, several of which tour performing the classic scores live to screenings of Deep Red, Suspiria, and Dawn of the Dead. The co-founder and guitarist Massimo Morante died on 23 June 2022.
The Bureau\'s reading. Goblin belong in this archive at Tier II, as a soundtrack-and-horror anchor rather than as a core figure of the industrial or noise tradition. The case for inclusion is the influence of the scores: the idea that a rock group, working fast and with an odd instrumental palette, could define the sound of horror cinema, and that this sound would feed forward into the synth-horror lineage. The documentary anchor is the run of Cinevox soundtrack releases. The companion file is John Carpenter, the other principal horror-score entry in this catalogue; where Goblin are a group working with a director, Carpenter is the director scoring himself.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar era · last revised c. the postwar era