Screen to Speakers: 23 Goth-Coded Soundtracks Worth Turning Up
The alternative soundtracks that entered our playlists
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
The relationship between movies and music has given us some truly legendary listening. Few understood that relationship quite like Tim Curry, whose passing this year inspired us to revisit The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the songs that helped turn a strange little film into a cultural phenomenon. Fifty years later, audiences still know when to jump to the left.
In honour of Tim Curry and the enduring power of a perfectly curated soundtrack, we’re turning up 24 films and series whose music found a life beyond the screen. Some introduced us to new artists, while others made familiar songs impossible to hear the same way again. All earned a permanent place in our playlists.
The Vampire Lestat (2026)
The Brat Prince trades immortality for rock stardom as Anne Rice’s most ostentatious vampire finally takes centre stage. The music is built into Lestat’s mythology, with original songs performed by Sam Reid alongside a glam-rock world engineered for a vampire who has waited centuries for his arena tour.
MaXXXine (2024)
An aspiring actress stalks 1980s Hollywood while a killer stalks the women around her. The soundtrack drops you straight onto the Sunset Strip with ZZ Top, New Order, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Kim Carnes and Animotion—sleazy, neon-soaked and hungry for fame.
Saltburn (2023)
An Oxford outsider becomes dangerously fixated on his aristocratic classmate and the decadent family estate he calls home. Its soundtrack bottles the hedonism of the mid-2000s with MGMT, Bloc Party, The Killers, Ladytron and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, whose “Murder on the Dancefloor” found a new life in its wake.
Daisy Jones & The Six (2023)
A fictional ’70s rock band rises spectacularly before imploding at the height of its fame. Original album Aurora gives the band an actual musical identity, while Fleetwood Mac, Patti Smith, David Bowie and other period staples fill out a hazy world of Laurel Canyon glamour, backstage chemistry and rock-star excess.
The Idol (2023)
A troubled pop star attempts a comeback after falling under the influence of a seductive nightclub impresario. The Weeknd, Madonna, Playboi Carti, Mike Dean, Lily-Rose Depp and Suzanna Son soundtrack a seedy, narcotic version of Los Angeles where celebrity is its own vice.
The Dirt (2019)
Mötley Crüe’s rise from Sunset Strip misfits to one of rock’s most notorious bands gets the full sex-drugs-and-hair-metal treatment. Naturally, Mötley Crüe dominates, surrounded by the sounds of an era built on screaming guitars, eyeliner, leather and spectacularly poor impulse control.
Euphoria (2019)
Rue and the teenagers orbiting her navigate addiction, sex, identity and desire in a suburban world rendered almost hallucinatory. Labrinth’s atmospheric original music collides with an enormous catalogue of pop, hip-hop, electronic, indie and vintage needle drops, making the soundtrack as integral to Euphoria’s aesthetic language as its rhinestones and coloured light.
Killing Eve (2018–2022)
An intelligence investigator and an impeccably dressed assassin develop a mutual obsession that becomes increasingly difficult to classify. Unloved supplies its seductive musical signature, surrounded by French pop, psych, vintage European curiosities and off-kilter selections that make Villanelle’s violence feel perversely chic.
The Neon Demon (2016)
An ingénue enters the Los Angeles modelling industry and discovers beauty can be a blood sport. Cliff Martinez’s icy electronic score pulses beneath the film like music bleeding through the walls of an exclusive nightclub—hypnotic, synthetic and increasingly threatening.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
A disgraced journalist and formidable hacker investigate a decades-old disappearance within a wealthy Swedish family. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross turn electronics, distortion and industrial unease into nearly three hours of winter-dark dread, beginning with their ferocious Karen O-assisted take on “Immigrant Song.”
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
A high-school queen bee becomes a literal man-eater while her best friend tries to stop the carnage. Its soundtrack is a Hot Topic receipt from 2009 in album form: Panic! at the Disco, Paramore, All Time Low, Dashboard Confessional and Cobra Starship, with fictional emo band Low Shoulder making the music part of the actual horror.
Underworld (2003)
A leather-clad vampire warrior becomes entangled in an ancient war between vampires and Lycans. Its industrial-goth atmosphere extends to a soundtrack featuring David Bowie, A Perfect Circle, Puscifer and Skinny Puppy—music made for blue-black nightclubs, PVC and supernatural warfare.
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Two horror titans are unleashed against one another while an unfortunate group of teenagers gets caught between them. The soundtrack is an early-2000s metal time capsule loaded with Slipknot, Killswitch Engage, Lamb of God, Type O Negative, Stone Sour, Hatebreed, DevilDriver and In Flames.
Resident Evil (2002)
A covert team descends into an underground laboratory after a viral outbreak turns its inhabitants into monsters. Slipknot, Coal Chamber, Fear Factory, Static-X, Rammstein and Mudvayne turn the soundtrack into a sweaty Y2K industrial/nu-metal club night with an extremely unfortunate zombie problem.
Queen of the Damned (2002)
Vampire Lestat wakes from decades of sleep, becomes an international rock star and attracts the attention of something considerably older than his fanbase. Jonathan Davis helped construct Lestat’s sound, while Wayne Static, David Draiman, Chester Bennington, Jay Gordon and Marilyn Manson helped make the soundtrack a nu-metal/goth artifact so potent it arguably outlived the film.
Almost Famous (2000)
A budding teenage music journalist hits the road with a rock band on the upswing and discovers the mythology of rock ’n’ roll is messy from backstage. Cameron Crowe builds the soundtrack from the music that made him fall in love with the scene in the first place, with Led Zeppelin and The Who alongside Elton John and David Bowie. Few needle drops have become as inseparable from a film as “Tiny Dancer,” turning a tour-bus singalong into one of cinema’s great love letters to the strange intimacy music creates between people.
The Matrix (1999)
A hacker discovers that reality itself is a prison and joins the rebellion attempting to break humanity free. Rob Zombie, Rammstein, Deftones, Ministry, The Prodigy and Marilyn Manson make its soundtrack sound like latex, fluorescent tubes and an illegal warehouse rave at the end of the millennium.
Blade (1998)
A half-vampire hunter wages war against the bloodsuckers hiding inside the human world. Techno, trip-hop, hip-hop and electronic music give its vampire underground a distinctly late-’90s pulse, with that legendary opening blood rave permanently associating vampirism with pounding club music.
Spawn (1997)
A murdered assassin returns from Hell as a supernatural antihero caught in a war considerably larger than himself. Its soundtrack took the gloriously unhinged approach of pairing rock and metal artists with electronic acts: Metallica x DJ Spooky, Korn x The Dust Brothers, Slayer x Atari Teenage Riot—industrial chaos as a collaborative experiment.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Two lovers become celebrity murderers while America eagerly turns their killing spree into entertainment. Trent Reznor assembled a deliberately fractured sonic collage featuring Nine Inch Nails, Patti Smith, Jane’s Addiction, Leonard Cohen and L7, mirroring the film’s violent channel-surfing sensory overload.
The Crow (1994)
A murdered musician returns from the grave to avenge his fiancée and his own death. The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine, Helmet and Pantera turn its soundtrack into an alternative/goth/industrial monument—the rare compilation as iconic as the black-clad avenger it accompanies.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
A documentary crew follows an aging British heavy-metal band whose dignity disappears considerably faster than its ambitions. The fictional Spinal Tap supplies its own gloriously excessive metal catalogue, making the joke considerably funnier because the songs are convincing enough to almost work.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
A stranded young couple enters a castle and discovers Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s gloriously uninhibited night of sex, science and self-invention. Glam rock, rock ’n’ roll and musical theatre collide in “Time Warp,” “Sweet Transvestite” and “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” creating a soundtrack that escaped the screen to become part of goth and queer midnight-movie ritual itself.
The magic of a soundtrack is that eventually, it stops belonging entirely to the story that introduced it to you. A song discovered during a favourite film finds its way into the car, onto a party playlist or through your headphones on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Years later, a few opening notes can bring the whole thing rushing back. So turn these up, revisit an old favourite and keep listening for the next song worth stealing from the screen.
What’s your favourite film soundtrack?
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