Soundtrack Dissonance/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Uploaders description: The music transition is awesome. From the musician practically having a seizure of the keyboard or two to an acapella Christmas carol. BRILLIANT!

  • Fritz Lang's M uses this trope with In the Halls of the Mountain King. The criminally insane child murderer whistles (often slowly, and off-key) this upbeat song when he feels the urge to kill rising within him.
  • Film composer Henry Mancini discusses this trope in his autobiography, referring to it as "playing against the scene."
  • The somber musical score to Young Frankenstein is squarely at odds with the screwball tone of the film, yet somehow works perfectly well.
  • Eraserhead: "In heaven, everything is fine. In heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things, and I've got mine..."
  • Lampshaded twice in Shaun of the Dead, as the jukebox in the pub starts up and plays an unwanted song at the worst possible moment -- a depressing love song as the protagonist ponders the loss of his girlfriend, and Queen's chirpy "Don't Stop Me Now" as the characters are under deadly threat. The characters take note both times.
  • This seems to be fairly common in older live-action Japanese movies as well. The Japanese version of Godzilla 1985 features a pop song over the ending credits.
    • An even more Egregious example can be found in The Legend of the Dinosaurs, which has an equally inane love song playing over the film's climax, which involves the film's heroes being burned to death by molten lava.
  • At the end of Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, the doomsday switches have been flipped and mushroom clouds are erupting, all to the tune of the optimistic "We'll Meet Again." This was no accident; the entire movie is satire, so why not the closing montage?
    • "We'll Meet Again" was often played to boost morale during World War II, and this sequence demonstrates that things won't be quite the same during World War III.
    • Though the fact it's about soldiers going off to war and hoping to see their loved ones again when about 14 million soldiers died on the Allied side, where do you think they'll meet?
      • Which is what the song "Vera" from The Wall is about -- the singer sarcastically muses about what "We'll Meet Again" actually means.
      • And in a similar vein, the tune can also be heard in The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.
    • Don't forget the opening credits -- a lush arrangement of "Try a Little Tenderness" turns military footage of a B-52 aerial refueling into soft-core porn.
  • Quest for Camelot overlays a seriously weird chase scene with the soft, loving voice of Celine Dion singing "The Prayer".
  • Interview with the Vampire; as Louis sits in a plague-infested hovel and weeps despairingly over the unconscious body of a little girl he believes himself to have killed, Lestat snatches up the rotting corpse of the child's mother and proceeds to dance a happy waltz with it while a merry, lively tune bounces along on the soundtrack. Nightmare Fuel, indeed.
  • There are two instances of this in the fourth Harry Potter: first in the Forbidden Forest, when Harry's friends sing the cheerful Hogwarts school song in the background while an ominous score plays and Harry discovers the body of Barty Crouch, Sr. The scene is recalled later after Harry returns from the Little Hangleton graveyard and the scene of Voldemort's return clutching Cedric's dead body to the sound of a cheering Hogwarts crowd and the band playing the bouncy, brassy, fully-orchestrated version of the song.
    • A third, thanks to the 6th movie. Dumbledore has just died, and they play cheerful, almost carnival music over the credits. What. The. Hell.
    • Umbridge's leitmotif is outwardly bright and happy, much like the character. However, the brightness and happiness in the song is played in such a way that you can actually sense evil lurking beneath it.
  • The Haunting of Molly Hartley totally goes here. The movie ends with her now stuck working for the devil, apathetically dismissing her father as a disturbed mental patient, and then a graduation speech at high school, with happy music played over the last scene and credits.
  • Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs has two such instances: the use of "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel for the infamous scene where Mr. Blonde tortures a cop; and the use of Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" in the closing credits immediately following the bloody finale where just about everybody dies. The scene was intended by Tarantino as an homage to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist sings "Singin' In The Rain" while beating the crap out of an old man whose home he's just invaded.
  • Speaking of Tarantino, for Pulp Fiction, he originally wanted to use The Knack's "My Sharona" during the scene when Butch decided to rescue Marsellus as he was beaten and raped by the pawn shop clerk and his security guard friend. He felt that the song had a "good sodomy beat to it". Since the song was already licensed to "Reality Bites", Tarantino used "Comanche" by The Revels.
  • A particularly violent shootout in The Coen Brothers' Millers Crossing is set to the somber love-song "Danny Boy".
  • John Woo's Face Off, where the song "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" plays during a silent gunfight.
  • "Que Sera Sera" was written for Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much remake; its upbeat tune and lyrics were intended as an ironic counterpoint to a story about kidnapping.
    • Upbeat tune and lyrics? Not if you listen to the Pink Martini version of it used during a Dead Like Me episode as George tries to understand why a little girl has to die. Bittersweet, my friend, bittersweet.
  • The Proposition opens with a small child singing a song called "Happy Land" while old-timey family photographs fly by. Some of the photos are of burnt-out houses, and labeled "The Site of the Hopkins Massacre". When the music stops, we are then plunged into the middle of a vicious gunfight.
    • A more attention-grabbing example from The Proposition is the calm, melancholy "Peggy Gordon", which is sung while a character is being brutally flogged. It is also sung again at the climax, when a rape is occurring. In fact, it's sung by the rapist.
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) has Amazing Grace (the bagpipe version) playing when Donald Sutherland finds the pods being loaded onto a cargo ship. Amazing Grace was playing just to lure humans to the ship.
  • And let's not forget the basement scene in The Evil Dead, with the cheerful jazz music and the bleeding lightbulb and slide projector.
    • That exact same music is also used, by way of Shout-Out, at the beginning of the fifth Creepshow segment.
  • Turned all around as early as 1932's Freaks, whose title card is accompanied by some deeply chilling, Circus of Fear type music and stylized, nightmarish images of most of the titular characters. Yet the majority of the film's one-hour run time is spent with them just hanging out, and it's pretty much a Sitcom with a mostly-deformed cast... up to the point that the freaks start stalking a woman who married one of their own for money and then tried to murder him. That scene, however, had no music.
  • In the trailer for the video game movie Hitman, the titular character is shown killing large numbers of Mooks... while Schubert's "Ave Maria" plays in the background.
    • Something similar happens in the ending of Hitman: Blood Money, when the title character kills everyone attending his own funeral, including the bastard who set him up.
  • The trailer for the Death Note live-action film has the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California" in the background.
    • Also used for the credits. While the tone seems out of place, the song is about a criminal beloved to the singer who brought on herself her own demise. Kira kills criminals. Lyrically appropriate, at least.
  • Uwe Boll, unsurprisingly, seems fond of this. For example, the sex scene in Alone in The Dark has a song about slavery and torture in Africa as background. This may be more of a case of Isn't It Ironic?, though.
  • Battle Royale. Students killing each other left and right... to the accompaniment of various soothing classical pieces played over a loudspeaker on the island on which they're fighting.
  • Blue Velvet.
  • In the Loop features a scene during which Jamie McDonald angrily trashes a fax machine from which a document containing classified intelligence was printed and leaked to the opposition, while opera music plays from a computer in the background. Jamie quickly notices this, and orders that someone "turn that fucking racket off!"
  • In Hellboy, Dr. Bruttenholm resigns himself to his murder while "We'll Meet Again" plays on a phonograph across the room, in a shoutout to the above Strangelove.
  • A Clockwork Orange features a number of examples, including several scenes of violence set to beautiful classical music. Most notably, however, is the home invasion and rape set to Alex's performance of "Singing in the Rain". The song was chosen simply because Malcolm McDowell knew all the words offhand.
  • And Die Hard famously uses "Ode to Joy" as the villain's theme song. That song doesn't fare much better than "What a Wonderful World".
    • Michael Kamen had a habit of quoting popular/traditional music. The original movie includes some tense quotes of "Winter Wonderland", while the third references "Daisy Bell" (along with less dissonant, but still noticeable quotes of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and "Go Down Moses").
    • Die Hard 2: While John's sneaking around under the terminal, the Source Music from the janitor's record player is Patti Page's "Old Cape Cod".
  • In Schindler's List, a Nazi plays Mozart on the piano while the other SS members are massacring the Krakow Ghetto.
    • And the scene when the Nazis put Gute Nacht Mutter and a child's song on the camp's speakers while making the selection of persons that can work, while the unlucky ones were put on a train of death or boarded trucks to be shot in the woods.
    • The scariest part is that this is a partial Truth in Television; some of the heads of the extermination camps would allow a reprieve for prisoners to live longer if they had musical skill, these prisoners would play music, although never "German" music, while the mass executions occurred.
  • There's also the scene in the movie The Untouchables, where Malone gets his guts machine-gunned to pieces by Al Capone's sniper, and proceeds to agonizingly drag himself down his hallway, spitting and oozing massive amounts of blood as he goes. The scene is interspliced with clips of Capone watching a performance of the opera Pagliacci, and sincerely weeping over the beauty of the singer's voice. The music is not cut off whenever the scene cuts away from the opera -- it continues to play over both locations.
  • The opening credits for the 2006 version of The Hills Have Eyes play the song "More And More" over nuclear testings and photos of deformed children. (Although the deforming had actually been caused by Agent Orange.)
  • We can count also the Baddies' Theme from the original The Last House on the Left which was peppy and cheery playing over the baddies taking Mari and Phyllis away to abuse and murder them. Of course, given that the lyrics of said peppy song say let's have some fun with those two little children and off them as soon as we're done it can be also regarded as Lyrical Dissonance.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas opens with file footage of various unpleasant incidents from the '60s while "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music plays. The off-kilter effect suits a movie about a massive drug trip rather well.
  • The original trailer for Blade Runner featured prominent use of "If I Didn't Care" by the Ink Spots. The song quite blatantly clashes with the imagery.
  • A case could be made for The Third Man, with its happy zither music.
  • In American Psycho, Serial Killer Patrick Bateman commits an axe murder to the tune of "Hip to be Square" while commenting on the appropriateness of the music to '80s culture.
    • In the novel, he's humming a tune of a TV show that he watched as a child (he can't remember what it was), while making a sausage out of the body of a woman he just killed.
    • A (fan-made?) trailer that can be found on YouTube for American Psycho uses The Beach Boys' optimistic song Wouldn't It Be Nice (a song about two young lovers wanting to get married) to some pretty brutal and bloody clips.
  • The Silence of the Lambs has a few of these, including Buffalo Bill's disturbing dance to the tune of "Goodbye Horses" while his victim screams in the background, and Hannibal killing and cannibalizing two guards while wistfully listening to Bach's "Goldberg Variations".
  • Kill Bill. The Bride slices up the Crazy 88 to jazz and J-pop.
    • And, conversely, having O-Ren and The Bride square off against each other to the incredibly loud and energetic "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", only to have it stop immediately when first blood is drawn.
  • Happiness is the king of this trope, playing upbeat jazzy music/happily melodramatic music to scenes involving mass murder, ejaculation, and pedophilia. Of course, this is to be expected of such a disturbing black comedy.
  • Director Cameron Crowe does this a lot. Examples that come to mind include Almost Famous, in which Stevie Wonder's "Ma Cherie Amour" plays while the protagonist's love interest overdoses in a hotel bathroom. In Vanilla Sky, Todd Rundgren's breakup anthem "Can We Still Be Friends" plays after the main character has killed his lover, or her duplicitous double, or something, and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" booms out awesomely as his mind starts to unravel and he sort of starts to figure out how very wrong he is about everything.
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian features the Crucifixion, with all the crucified singing Eric Idle's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life".
  • In The Night of the Hunter, the truly nightmarish villain goes around singing gospel. There's also a scary montage of the children traveling downriver with a lullaby in the background.
  • After the Tear Jerker ending of The World According To Garp (Garp gets shot and dies), they could have just run the ending credits in silence after the appropriate "There Will Never Be Another You". No, they had to reuse the bouncy "When I'm Sixty-Four" from the opening credits. This may have been on purpose, though. It certainly turned that song into a Tear Jerker.
  • Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind has a scene of Chuck Barris doing his CIA work... with a hilarious "If I Had a Hammer" rendition in the background.
  • Marie Antoinette: the film is set in the time of the actual Marie Antoinette, but its soundtrack is deliberately and loudly filled with 70s and 80s New Wave/Punk/Glam Rock acts (New Order, Adam & the Ants, Siouxsie and the Banshees).
  • Needful Things couples this with Left the Background Music On. Two characters hack and slash at each other in typically King gore fashion to the tune of Ave Maria. It then cuts to the movie's antagonist listening to a record of this song.
  • National Lampoon's Vacation. Okay, it's a comedy, but the juxtaposition of the bright and cheerful Here Comes Santa Claus with the images of SWAT teams surrounding the Griswold residence is a classic example of using this trope for deliberate humorous effect.
  • In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured film The Crawling Hand, our hero, possessed by something from an arm that fell from space, strangles the malt shop owner nearly to death while "Surfin' Bird" plays.
  • In House, Betty Everett's "You're No Good" plays while William Katt chops up the corpse of a witch and buries her in the backyard.
  • Partially Subverted Trope in the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which features Bond cradling his dead wife in his arms. We immediately cut to the Closing Credits as the normally upbeat James Bond theme plays... but it's a version of the theme that sounds brittle and almost manic.
    • Played straight earlier in when being chased by the Big Bad's henchmen, a cheery Christmas song with backing vocals done by children plays
  • In Silent Hill, the heroine finds herself surrounded by screeching burnt baby things, and they're slowly advancing on her...and she's trapped in a back-alley. She collapses, and then wakes up, babies gone, with Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" playing on a jukebox nearby.
  • In the Outkast musical Idlewild, the song "Happy Days Are Here Again" plays over a radio in a garage while Rooster watches Deceptive Disciple Trumpy off Spats and Sunshine Ace.
  • In Goodfellas, the brutal, gory beating of Billy Batts is accompanied by the strains of Donovan's romantic, hippie-fied psychedelic pop-folk song "Atlantis," which is playing on the jukebox at the time.
    • Not to mention the long montage showing the discoveries of several brutally murdered corpses set to the piano coda from Derek and the Dominos' "Layla".
  • Stanley Kubrick seems to have been quite fond of this trope. In addition to the A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove examples mentioned above, there's also the classic scene in Full Metal Jacket setting gritty Vietnam War realism to the tune of "Surfin' Bird".
    • "Hey there, hi there, ho there, you're as welcome as can be. M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E." Sounds a lot more disturbing when it's sung by soldiers marching through a warfield -- though perhaps not more so than soldiers using "Green Eggs and Ham" as a marching cadence.
    • Don't forget The Shining, when Danny goes to his room to get his fire engine and finds Jack Torrance wide awake. Jack hugs and expresses love for his son while Bela Bartok's incredibly somber and ominous Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta: Adagio is heard. A very creepy scene, especially considering what's ahead.
  • Brazil's main Leitmotif, the bossa nova song "Brazil", is a happy tune in a movie about a soul crushing, bureaucratic, dystopia.
    • Then there's the bombing in the restaurant - the waiter apologizes profusely and pulls up a screen in an ineffective attempt to hide the sight of the carnage, and the musicians start playing "Hava Nagila" over the screams.
  • WALL-E opens with "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", a chipper little tune from Hello, Dolly!!...which plays during a somewhat depressing sequence depicting the title character, lonely and going through his daily duties in a deserted, trash-covered Earth.
    • This contrast is made even more intense by the first images during the song being beautiful starscapes and whirling galaxies.
  • Grosse Pointe Blank opens with the main character assassinating citizens to "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash, a cheery, upbeat little number.
  • At the end of The Devils Rejects, the titular family commit Suicide by Cop to the tune of "Freebird", with the freeze frame of their deaths, as well as all of the gunshots occurring during the upbeat and frenzied solo.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: while having creepy mannequin-filled suburban homes was vaguely justified by it being a nuclear test, what purpose could setting up a bunch of TV sets to play Howdy Doody possibly serve?!
    • That scene was based directly on a real nuclear test that was actually conducted in 1957. The TV sets and radios were on because the entire purpose of the test was to determine the effects of a distant airburst on a typical suburban neighbourhood.
  • In Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, after the penguins begin stealing vans to rebuild their plane, they manage to run over an old woman. After realizing she's still alive they turn on the music and proceed to hit her again while Boston's "More Than a Feeling" blasts from the speakers.
  • An unusual sort of Soundtrack Dissonance occurrs in A Beautiful Mind: in the car chase scene, in which John Nash and his boss are pursued and shot at by two Soviet agents, the musical score avoids an action theme and opts instead for a dark and surprisingly lonely piano theme as the two cars exchange fire. However, the music becomes somewhat more appropriate when Nash is found to be suffering from schizophrenia, and imagined the entire scenario. The music -- a particular theme involved specifically with Nash's delusions of Soviet conspiracies -- is meant to symbolize his continuing breakdown.
  • The clock radio which counts down the protagonist's supposed hour in Fourteen Oh Eight repeatedly (and autonomously) breaks into The Carpenter's "We've Only Just Begun." This is combined with the countdown resetting itself, and new inventive tortures being pulled by the Genius Loci. The cumulative effect is terrifying.
  • The final scenes of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz all involve wildly dissonant music, ranging from "Bye Bye Love" (performed while Joe Gideon's heart finally gives out) to "There's No Business Like Show Business" (which kicks in when Gideon is zipped into a body bag).
  • In The Bad Seed, Rhoda sets fire to Leroy's bedding while he sleeps, then goes upstairs and plays "Au Clair de la Lune" on the piano at increasing speed as Leroy screams in agony.
  • Due to Crystal Ball Scheduling with a wild sense of humor, this pops up a few times in Being There. Middle-aged upper-class people being driven in a limo up to the Big Fancy House just isn't the same when the music on the TV is the Cheech and Chong song "Basketball Jones". And Shirley MacLaine putting the moves on Peter Sellers may sound odd enough on its own, but then you add Mister Rogers singing about friendship...
  • The Wicker Man famously ends with the Anti-Hero being burned to death in the titular wicker man, while the townsfolk sing a rousing chorus of "Sumer is icumen in", led by Christopher Lee.
  • Waltz with Bashir makes extensive use of this trope.
  • Rob Zombie's Halloween has the light warblings of "Mister Sandman", before a slightly-sinister octave shift. Then a full out switch to totally head-down evil.
    • Of course, that's a clear homage to Halloween II (1981), which ended with the original song playing as flames engulfed Michael's corpse.
      • In Zombie's version of II, a cover of "Love Hurts" plays over Laurie's Dying Dream. This is only in the Director's Cut -- in the Theatrical Cut, she is institutionalized in Smith's Grove as the traditional theme music plays.
    • Don't forget the use of 10cc's "The Things We Do For Love" in the sequel, which plays in the background as we see a man's face mashed to a pulp from a car wreck and his badly-injured passenger spitting out the ultimate Cluster F-Bomb. Word of God states this was based on an incident that happened to a friend of Zombie's.
  • Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses has Slim Whitman's "I Remember You" playing over super slow motion scenes of graphic torture and murder.
  • In U Turn, the volume on the relaxing, almost elevator music-esque song playing on a grocery store's radio inexplicably cranks up as its owner guns down a couple of escaping robbers with a double-barreled shotgun.
  • Office Space: Most notably, the use of gangsta rap to soundtrack a relatively simple, white-collar crime, and violent, brutal rap music playing while they destroy office equipment as though they were beating a person to death. Soundtrack dissonance is the source of maybe half the laughs in this movies.
    • The movie studio got pissed too when Mike Judge originally used the music, but let him use it when a test screening resulted in positive feedback for the soundtrack.
  • Watchmen opens with The Comedian getting brutally murdered to the tune of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable". The fact that the source of this music is a television advertisement for Veidt Industries' Nostalgia Perfume could be seen as an early clue that the assassin is Veidt himself. The value-neutral-in-lyrics but somewhat-upbeat-in-tune The Times They Are A-Changin' (by Bob Dylan, of course) playing over the various things that occurred in the leadup to the start of the film could be seen as similar, since most of the events -- Silhouette's murder, Richard Nixon's election, Mothman's insanity, etc. -- are bad things.
    • The use of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" during Dan and Laurie's sex scene. The use of that song at that particular moment screams of "Hallelujah! I'm getting laid!"
    • Don't forget KC & The Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man" playing over the Comedian's riot dispersal.
  • The soundtrack of Transformers: The Movie borders on this trope from time to time, most notably with "Weird" Al Yankovic's "Dare To Be Stupid" playing during the Autobot vs. Junkion battle scene. Well, it's either this trope or Crowning Music of Awesome...
  • The Saturday Night Live film Dirty Work has one scene set in a bar that plays this for laughs. A bar fight's about to break out. One of the drunks goes straight to the jukebox shouting about how he's going to cue up the Rolling Stones' "Street Fightin' Man" for this very occasion. Unfortunately, he hits the wrong button. Cue a bar fight set to the thumping tones of... "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)".

Man: "Looks like there's gonna be a brawl. You playin' something good? "
Chris Farley: "Hell, yeah! Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man! G! 7!"
Man: "...you just hit G-8."

Jukebox: "If you like Pina Coladas... and getting caught in the rain..."

  • Eagle Rock over the closing credits for Dead Heart.
  • In Bruce Dickinson's and Julian Doyle's Chemical Wedding, we are treated to the sight of Simon Callow as Aleister Crowley striding down a Cambridge University hallway to deliver a lecture while listening to the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. It get weirder from there.
  • The titular song in Jeepers Creepers goes the way of many children's songs, triggering nearly a Pavlovian response (run, hide) by the gruesome close of the film.
  • Justified in the third The Lord of the Rings. When Denethor demands Pippin sing him a song, Pippin tells him that hobbits don't know any songs appropriate to a war, only happy songs. Denethor tells him to sing one anyway. The song that follows (taken from an earlier and happier point in the books) accompanies images of soldiers being sent on a suicide mission and killed. Of course, Pippin sings the happy lyrics so sadly that it's almost appropriate.
  • Space Mutiny, as pointed out by Mystery Science Theater 3000, has a scene where one of the bad guys quietly and calmly walks into a room... followed by epic DUN-DUNNA-DUN-DUN music.
  • |Poltergeist inexplicably begins with "The Star-Spangled Banner" playing over the credits; our confusion is resolved when we realize it's a TV station playing the national anthem before ending their broadcast for the evening.
  • Simultaneously inverted and played straight in Dawn of the Dead's ending credits. The upbeat muzak seems to clash with zombies wandering aimlessly around a mall, until you realize that they're just stand-ins for human shoppers who'd be doing exactly the same thing.
  • In both the movie and the novel Little Big Man, towards the end when Custer's 7th Cavalry is massacring an entire Native American village, including the protagonist's family, in the background is the cheery strains of "Garry Owen" played by the regimental band. This was the actual marching song of the 7th cavalry.
    • John Ford did it earlier in The Searchers, where there's a scene of US cavalry returning from slaughtering an Indian village und hustling the survivors (mostly white women captured by the Indians) off to a fort to the strains of the same tune. Probably based on the same action by the 7th Cavalry, it takes place in the middle of winter.
  • Another John Ford film, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, has a scene with an operation performed on a moving wagon, where the colonel's wife (Mildred Natwick) sings the cheerful song of the title to help the patient to take his mind off the pain.
  • Funny Games starts with a happy family driving through a beautiful country road and listening to opera. When the credits begin, the soundtrack suddenly switches to a shockingly discordant and abrasive song with grinding guitars, piercing trumpets, and meaningless screeching.
    • That song is called Bonehead and it's by Naked City.
  • Fallen uses "Time Is On My Side" in somewhat the same manner as an Ironic Nursery Rhyme, first playing as a criminal is to be executed, then sung by the villain as a representation of how he's unstoppable. The hero uses the song himself during a rather clever Out-Gambitted.
  • In the thriller Transsiberia, a tense chase scene is set to the cheery Russian folk song "Kalinka".
  • Invoked in The Good the Bad And The Ugly. While Tuco is being tortured by Angel Eyes, a beautiful song plays. It's actually being played by the soldiers on their instruments outside, and they are apparently ordered to play whenever Angel Eyes decides to torture someone. His habit is to beat them until the song is over.
  • 2001, HAL singing "Daisy Bell" as it dies.
  • In Run Lola Run "What a difference a day makes" plays whilst Lola and Manni are being chased by the police.
  • Sort of subverted in the second Ong Bak movie, in that the long fight scene at the end switches between fast-paced metal, what sounds like Ominous Latin Chanting and singing in some unspecified language. All are appropriate to the scene, hence the subversion, but the change is noticeable.
  • The theme song from Jurassic Park is surprisingly upbeat for a movie about dinosaurs eating people.
    • It is not, however, surprisingly upbeat when it's a theme for when people see REAL GODDAMN DINOSAURS.
  • In The Boat That Rocked / Pirate Radio, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys plays as the boat starts to sink, and the crew rush to get out in time.
  • In the documentary Super Size Me, the Blue Danube plays. To the tune of a person having a bypass surgery, in graphic detail. Might be a subversion, because not only the surgery is quick and painless, the person is shown to be alive and healthy(er) in the epilogue.
  • Public domain editions of The Lost World (1925) get a good dose of this for all the wrong reasons. Imagine happy springtime music playing while an Allosaurus bears down on the hero's campsite. Ya see? They Just Didn't Care. Thank god the DVD versions have the original score(s).
    • Nosferatu often suffers from this as well. We get the pure horror that is Orlok, but with a jazzy high-hat in the background. Not quite right. Especially since the original score is so damn good.
  • In the Tom Cruise version of |The War of the Worlds, light-hearted Christmas-type music plays from speakers as refugees pour onto the ferry point. Most of them are dead soon afterwards.
  • Dr. Phibes Rises Again ends with the title character, played by Vincent Price, singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" as he wins.
  • The scene in Nine where, after a heartwarming sequence in which "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" plays and the characters are all relaxed and having fun, it takes a disturbing twist when The Big Bad pulls a Disney Death and proceeds to chase an unlucky 5 across the field. The only sounds to be heard are 5's frantic screams for the others to run, and Somewhere Over The Rainbow still playing eerily in the background. This terrifying moment is emphasised by the lyrics being sung as we see 5 running toward the screen in desperate escape, the machine not far behind: If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, then why, oh why, can't I?
  • Duran Duran's Ordinary World provides the jarring background music to a truly savage beating dished out in a greasy spoon caff in Layer Cake.
  • Play Misty for Me ends with - what else? - Erroll Garner's "Misty" on the soundtrack.
  • Citizen Kane is a pretty sad film but don't worry, the end credits should pick you right up.
  • The Film of the Book version of Trainspotting features this throughout, but the most genius is Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" over shots of the protagonists running from the cops in the beginning, and then later, the exact same footage is set to Blur's "Sing", creating a completely different scene entirely.
    • That scene's very good; however, the whole "Renton O'Ding to Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day'" is, by far, the best example.
  • Not sure what to make of the end credits for Iron Man. Sure, the Black Sabbath song kicks about as much ass as the title character, but when the song was originally written, it was specifically written to make the character out as a villain, so as to distinguish him as much as possible from the comic book superhero. In a way, the song works better for Obadiah Stane than it does for Tony Stark.
    • Which is probably why the credits have only the instrumental parts of the song...
  • In the Steven Seagal film Driven to Kill, every time Seagal's character gets into a fight or starts shooting, cheesy Russian folk music starts blaring.
  • Pink Flamingos has the final scene set to "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window". The scene in question has Divine picking up and eating dog poop. This scene is purportedly exploited in the Funday Pawpet Show in the Pink Flamingo challenge. Apparently, those who've watched that scene are never be able to listen to that song ever again without gagging.
  • Blue Moon, You Saw Me Standing Alone- "JESUS CHRIST"!!!
  • David Dobkin's "Clay Pigeons" uses this several time. For example, the Old 97's "Timebomb" plays over the opening credits, right after Joaquin Phoenix's best friend kills himself in front of him. Later in the movie, Elvis Presley's version of "It's Now or Never" play during a murder scene.
  • Spaceballs ends with the Spaceballs completely defeated, their ship about to self-destruct, and, as they desperately run for the escape pods, this song about how big and bad they are plays.
  • "Nobody But Me" by the Human Beinz is a popular ironic song to play in the background of gratuitous violence: See The Bride vs. the 88's or the convince store brawl in The Departed.
  • The German movie Krabat, about a boy who learns Black Magic from a warlock owning a mill who made a Deal with the Devil and has to sacrifice one of his twelve apprentices per year, lest he loses his own soul (and life). Said boy overcomes said warlock with the help of his girl and The Power of Friendship. Cue the closing credits with the song "Wir sind allein" (we are alone). Er... what? Wasn't the whole point of the movie that he's NOT alone?
  • In the Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl makes her first appearance flipping around in an apartment and slaughtering everybody in the room except for the title character. The music that accompanies this? The theme song from The Banana Splits (a cover of it, anyway.)
  • Sleeper uses jaunty ragtime jazz music in its shiny plastic future setting - justified as it fits Woody Allen's Fish Out of Water predicament.
  • All I Have To Do Is Dream is perfect horror after seeing this movie. All you have to do is dream...
  • How can everyone forget the hangar scene from A New Hope, right after Obi-Wan's Heroic Sacrifice? While Luke and the stormtroopers exchange blaster fire, a traumatic, mournful tune provides the soundtrack. Glorious.
  • Quantum of Solace does this more or less in the opera scene, because both the action and the music deal with death, although the opera music feels dissonant to the gritty action scene that it underscores.
  • P2 includes a scene of a tied up woman struggling to get out of a locked car trunk with "Santa Baby" playing in the background. What makes it a little more unnerving is that it's diegetic - the security guard Stalker with a Crush who put her there started blaring some holiday music over the intercom system to drown out her screams.
  • Director Martin Scorsese lives on this trope.
  • In Lethal Weapon, "Jingle Bell Rock" is the first song we hear. And then a half-naked, coked-up prostitute throws herself off a hotel balcony.
  • During The Wizard of Gore, when Montag is gleefully ripping bits out of his victims, a peppy jazz number plays every time.
    • Herschell Gordon Lewis seemed fond of this trope, see also the pantsuit-stripping scene in The Gore Gore Girls accompanied by the strains of an oompah band playing Strauss’ “Radetzky March.”
  • In Grizzly Park, where most of the music is soft acoustic, the DVD menu plays an ominous sounding tune overlapping some scenes from the film (bear confrontations mostly). Once the film is finished and the main menu appears however, instead of hearing the same music again, you are instead suddenly listening to a familiar childrens' camp song known as "The Other Day, I Saw a Bear", complete with happy voices (presumably childrens') and the same exact bear scenes from before. A roaring, bloodthirsty bear coupled with a cheery campfire tune? No thank you.
  • The obscure British film Parting Shots has this during the numerous murder scenes. Pointed out by Film Brain, among many other things.
  • The scene in Dogma, where Loki murders the Mooby board execs is done while the very upbeat Mooby theme song plays in the background.
  • "London Bridge is Falling Down" is a recurring motif in Falling Down, representing the Michael Douglas character's fractured innocence after he goes postal. He even gets a snowglobe that plays the song, and Detective Pendergast sings it to his bipolar wife to calm her down.
  • In the 1998 Canadian TV movie White Lies, Catherine Chapman (Sarah Polley) creeps through a library slipping neo-Nazi literature in between the books while "Put A Little Love In Your Heart" by Jackie DeShannon plays on the soundtrack.
  • In Akira Kurosawa's Ran, one of the battles witnessed by Hidetora starts out to the accompaniment of a mournful music, but with no sound effects. In a very effective switch, you then abruptly only hear the loud sounds of the fighting but no music.
    • Soundtrack dissonance was a very personal and important thing to Kurosawa. When his father died in 1948, he was walking around Tokyo to clear his thoughts and was tormented by the sound of the "Cuckoo Waltz". He told the composer for his upcoming film Drunken Angel to use the "Cuckoo Waltz" for ironic effect. He also went on to use soundtrack (and sound effect) dissonance for Stray Dog and Seven Samurai.
  • In The Madness of King George the scene where the king is gagged and bound to a chair for the first time is ironically underscored with the coronation anthem from Handel's Zadok the Priest.
  • The finale of the crazy chase at the end of The Blues Brothers is when Jake and Elwood get on a lift to reach the office where they have to deliver the check for the orphanage's back taxes. Scenes where the frenzied pursuers storm the building are then counterpointed with shots of the Blues Brothers silently standing in the lift as "The Girl from Ipanema" plays in a corny, soothing muzak version.
  • Roger And Me plays "Wouldn't It Be Nice" over streets full of derelict buildings and a news announcement saying that rats now outnumber humans in Flint.
  • Wild Beasts features a scene where a blind man is torn to pieces by his seeing eye dog while a gentle piano piece plays in the background. Justified Trope, since he's actually shown putting that particular record on before he's attacked.
  • The credits of Dogville. A shockingly violent ending, followed by Young Americans by David Bowie, while showing pictures of the worst-looking slums in the US. Holy crap.
  • Used in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story with the dissonance being both visual and harmonic as two Carpenters songs play whilst anorexic Karen Carpenter (played by a Barbie doll) vomits.
  • Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" over a scene of a prison riot in Natural Born Killers. The lyrics fit, but the distant, contemplative tone does not.
  • Airplane! has a Crosses the Line Twice use of this trope in a Dead Baby Comedy scene where the stewardess, Randy, plays "River of Jordan" to cheer up the Littlest Cancer Patient, accidentally knocks out her IV with a careless swing of the guitar, and keeps singing the song to the delight of the other passengers, oblivious to the girl's mother desperately trying to revive her.
  • Rigoletto (not to be confused with the opera,) footage of a child singing in a contest is both interspersed with and the soundtrack for a scene of her adult friend being beaten-- apparently to death-- by an angry mob. The innocence of the song makes the violent attack on an innocent man seem all the more horrifying, even though the scene isn't visually graphic at all.
  • In All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, the radio in Chloe's car plays bouncy Latin pop music as Emmet chases down Chloe with it.
  • Used well in The Social Network. When Mark is checking Erica's status update to see if she responds, after possibly losing his best friend, the peppy Beatles song "Baby, You're a Rich Man" is playing in the background, somewhat mocking his billionaire status.
  • V for Vendetta Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture playing as the British Parliament building is demolished by a trainload of explosives and fireworks.
    • It isn't really that dissonant consdiering the piece is often associated with firework displays and it has a lot of symbolic significance in the film.
      • Fireworks? Hell, the 1812 Overture itself features cannons. Those aren't just thrown in, either. The original score by Tchaikovsky actually calls for them!
  • In Precious, this happens frequently throughout the movie, but an obvious example is when an upbeat gospel Christmas song is playing as Precious's mother kicks her out and throws a TV at her and her week-old baby.
  • The end credits music from Marley and Me, which is a rather optimistic pop song sung at the end of the film in which the titular dog dies.
  • One Hundred and Twenty Seven Hours is a film about the life of Aron Ralston and how he got his arm trapped in a boulder while rock climbing. One scene of the film features him trying to get his arm out by creating a pulley system with his supplies. The song playing in this scene? "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers.
  • In Spider-Man 2, when Peter Parker is working as a photographer as he sees Mary Jane and John Jameson walking down the stairs together, in each others arms, set to the tune of a saxophone cover of the American National Anthem.
  • Samuel Barber's Adagio in Platoon. You wouldn't call it cheerful, but it is extremely beautiful, much like war isn't.
  • Insidious manages to make "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" by Tiny Tim unnerving; it's played during two incredibly creepy, tense scenes.
  • Kellys Heroes has resident Crazy Awesome Cloudcuckoolander tank commander Oddball ambushing a German work camp with three Shermans while playing an Ear Worm on loudspeakers. The song in question? "All For The Love Of Sunshine" by Hank Williams Jr.
  • The original ending of Thelma and Louise featured an instance of this. In the final cut, the car sails off the edge and freezes in mid-flight as the song "Thunderbird" is reprised. In the original ending, though, the car continues traveling downwards and flipping end over end into the canyon as BB King's "Better Not Look Down" (an upbeat song about keeping your spirits up) plays. The music keeps playing over Harvey Keitel's cop character looking down regretfully before cutting back to a shot of the car driving towards another canyon. The ending was meant to symbolize the pair continuing their journey in spirit, but the music is uplifting for a situation that was caused by circumstances beyond the control of the main characters.
  • Used for comedic purpose in Student Bodies. During the funeral of the Breather's first victims university band plays a slightly downtempo Ode to Joy.
  • The theme of the unofficial James Bond movie Never Say Never Again is a light, easy-listening tune, and it's first played during what is revealed to be a training scenario where Bond beats the crap out of everyone.
  • In the second The Chronicles of Narnia movie, in the ending.
  • In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin plays with a giant globe balloon to the hauntingly beautiful strains of the prelude to Lohengrin.
  • Cannibal Holocaust uses this and it is terrifying.
  • At John Landis' request, Elmer Bernstein scored Animal House as a drama - which made it even funnier.
  • If you haven't seen IT, you might think the theme tune is a bright, cheery circus tune.
  • At the climax of the film Kiss the Girls, a cheerful and upbeat version of the song "Goodnight, Irene" plays as the villain tries to rape the heroine, who eluded his grasp earlier in the movie. In fact, this trope might even be played twice here, as the song lyrics are actually FAR too dark (with allusions to murder and suicide) for the manner in which it is sung.
  • Drive Angry: In the second half of the movie, Oklahoma police herd Milton and Piper into a roadblock in order to execute them for their earlier cop-killing. Until the protagonists were about to be shot, music was either non-existent or appropriately grim. Then the Accountant drives in from behind the roadblock in a hydrogen fuel truck, speeding straight towards the cops and driving through their cars to get to them, explosions abounding. What starts playing? That's The Way I Like It by KC & the Sunshine Band, on the Accountants' radio, while he bobs his head to the music.
  • Sweeney Todd: The reprise of "Pretty Women" just before Sweeney kills Judge Turpin. Wow.
  • The film version of Apt Pupil ends with the song Das Ist Berlin, which is a happy and uplifting song, but in context is really creepy.
  • Dark Star ends with the main character performing Dramatic Space Drifting and is about to burn up in atmospheric re-entry, while the only other surviving crewmember is caught in a meteor swarm and is being pushed by it in the other direction. Since the whole film is Black Comedy, the natural soundtrack choice for this scene is the downbeat country number "Benson, Arizona".
  • The final scene of Terminator 3 shows the launch of the nuclear missiles on Judgment Day annihilating cities while a gentle violin melody plays.
  • The german movie Schtonk, a satire based on the forgery and publication of Hitlers diaries, starts at the End of the Battle of Berlin with soldiers carrying the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun outside. The music that plays is an actual german wartime song that goes "This is not the end of the world! Things will brighten up again!". It's entirely intentional.
  • The A Nightmare On Elm Street 2010 remake uses All I Have To Do Is Dream during one of the dream sequences. It plays during the credits as well.
  • In Contagion, during the scene where Dr. Mears dies and a researcher is discussing ordering more body bags from Canada, the soundtrack being played is an uplifting track called "Merry Christmas".
  • Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has Moriarty playing a phonograph of Schubert as Holmes is being tortured.
  • In the movie/documentary Touching the Void, a mountain climber recalls as he made his way back to his tent alone and with no supplies, he at one point had "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Boney M stuck in his head. We are then treated to a surreal, nightmarish sequence of him walking across the desolate icy landscape, while the song plays relentlessly over and over again.
  • A rare case of a dissonance with sadder music is the film Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar which is a lighthearted comedy about a Gallic village bravel opposing Roman soldiers with the help of a magic drink. While it does contain a subplot about Obelix's Unrequited Love to Fallballa, a local beauty, this is totally Played for Laughs and he quickly come over it. The title song, however, is fully about this, and a huge Tear Jerker. The name - "She simply doesn't see me" - says it all.

Even bordes guarded by millions of soldiers can be breached,
But the barrier between her and me can not...

  • In the 1978 Italian film Avere vent'anni, a movie which starts off as a light comedy and then ends with the two main female leads being brutally raped and killed, a soundtrack of bright, happy Europop plays during the shocking final scene.
  • The dialogue-free 2004 Australian film Defenceless: A Blood Symphony features a soundtrack of nothing but classical and new age music to accompany the relentless brutality and savage violence onscreen.
  • In this scene of Jarhead, a new Marine goes who graduated boot camp goes to a place prior to going to school of infantry, in this place he gets hazed, which consists of being branded. As this is happening, the song "Don’t Worry, Be Happy" is used for the soundtrack.
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