Why was the Unsolved Mysteries theme so scary?

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Gary Malkin co-wrote the theme music to “Unsolved Mysteries” and knows firsthand just how scary it was to millions of viewers — especially kids who stayed up past their bedtime to watch the reality show in the ’80s and ’90s.

“We used to get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘Could you please change the theme music? Our children are terrified of it,’” he recalled during a recent phone interview.

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It all began with the ostinato — the repeating rhythmic figure that gives the song its sense of urgent, inescapable menace — which he recalls hammering out on a piano. Then he added the “very scary” bass line.

The song also relies on an interval called the tritone. (It is, as Malkin puts it, “an exponential tritone extravaganza.”)

Also known as the devil’s interval or diabolus in musica, the tritone is a dissonant combination of tones that creates a sense of tension, ambiguity and instability, says Neil Lerner, a musicologist who studies music in film and television and teaches at Davidson College. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, religious music rarely used the tritone because it created a sense of unease and irresolution rather than majesty or awe.

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