Woman: I grew up in Colorado with my mom and dad and my little sister, and I lived in the same house my whole life, but I was never outdoorsy; I didn’t ski, I didn’t go outside, I was an actress, so I’m like, I wanna be on stage, I wanna be inside. My parents, there were some challenges. We would all yell and scream at each other if we were fighting, but we had to talk it out.

Man: My upbringing was very strange; we were Baptists. If you know about Baptists, if you hear a song, you can tap your foot or tap your hand, but you can’t do both because that’s dancing. You can’t do that. My dad and mom, they had a strong marriage, and they’re still together, but I didn’t really want their thing, I wanted my thing. And my thing had to be in, like, in a movie, right when the lights all go off, and you see her for the first time, and it’s this beautiful moment.

Man: I’m positive you don’t remember the first time you met me.

Woman: No, I don’t.

Man: Yeah, I know you don’t. I remember the first time I met you, though. It was like in the movies. I just knew this girl’s important, and of course, she wanted me back, totally.

Woman: No, I did not. He had the longest ponytail.

Man: Oh, we don’t have to talk about that.

Woman: Oh, yes, we do, he liked medieval things, so…

Man: Well, yeah, I like to do reenactments and things like that, which is not much more normal than having a ponytail for no reason.

Woman: Anyway, so we were going to do Little Shop of Horrors, we did the play, and it was fine; it actually worked out great.

Man: Well, okay, don’t get the wrong idea, but it was like pulling teeth some days, especially in rehearsal. She was mean. She was mean because I was weird, and I was weird because I knew she didn’t like it, and she was being mean to me.

Woman: Well, again, you had a ponytail, a long, anyway.

Man: You know, lots of people have ponytails.

Woman: Not that long.

Man: Lots of cool people.

Woman: Not that long, but we kept get cast together, kept getting cast together, and if, of course, if you’re in a play, you don’t need to hang out together a lot. We actually were hanging out, we were kind of dating for a whole year.

Man: No, no, no, three years, I waited three years, no other girlfriends, no other dates, and it wasn’t just because of you, it wasn’t, but I just waited.

Woman: We were going to movies, we were going to dinners, and I was thinking we were just friends.

Man: Those are dates, right?

Woman: I was thinking we were just friends, and I was in total denial, so after a year, I was finally like, are you gonna ever ask me out?

Man: I’m in the middle of my pumpkin spice latte, yeah, yeah, you wanna go out with me? We can do a movie like last week.

Man: We came from very different backgrounds, where, you know, your family talks, but you talk a little loud sometimes, and my family doesn’t talk, but we’re quiet. I went to your house, and your family is screaming at each other, and I’m sitting in the corner just terrified out of my mind, and then you came to my house, and we’ll start to argue or something, and everything dies down, and you’re like, is that it?

Woman: Is nobody talking about this?

Man: And there’s not many things that really get under my skin, but one of them is when it’s almost like a bombardment. Oh I hate what I’m wearing, and it’s like bam, I hate where we’re going, bam, I hate the people we’re seeing, bam, what’s good about today, I don’t know, bam.

Woman: I think, for sure, money can be a challenge. You always had trouble holding onto it.

Man: Very easy for me to spend money.

Woman: That was a challenge.

Man: That was a big one, I think, that was the biggest challenge we actually had. It’s fun now to talk about.

Woman: Oh boy.

Man: Do you wanna answer on three.

Woman: Uh, sure, are you ready, one, two, three, yes, yes.

Man: It’s been almost a decade that we’ve been together.

Woman: And we’ve been married for three years.

Man: Three years, I don’t know if I could even drive home without you.

Woman: That’s a good point, I kind of navigate everything.

Man: Yeah, you’re the one that does the map and stuff. You value yourself as an individual, and you give me space to be an individual, and we are who we are together.

Woman: And we’re still best friends.

Man: Yeah, we are, after all this time.

Woman: Did you just see that?

Man: I just knew exactly how I wanted my life to go, and I found you. That’s when everything started going better. Every day, after I’ve met you, it gets better and better and better.

Woman: I think that I have helped raise up those things that you were lacking, and learning how to communicate, and learning how to express yourself. And I think you’ve helped tame my raginess, my temper, you really have, it’s nice to kind of fill those voids and help raise each other up, rather than bring each other down.

Man: Maybe, that’s finding the part of you that’s missing in somebody else.

Woman: Yeah.

Man: I love you.

Woman: I love you too.

• a Baptist — a member of a Christian religious group
• a ponytail — tied long hair that is hanging down
• a reenactment — recreating a historical event using costumes and props
• mean — unpleasant to someone
• to get cast — to get a role in a play or a film
• in denial — not believing something is true

Reporter: Remember when Mufasa died? Or when Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle were killed? Or even when George Bailey decided he couldn’t bear to live anymore? These are some of the most grim, tragic moments in film history, but they have something else in common. Once you start paying attention, these four notes are everywhere. And we’ve been associating them with death for almost 800 years.

What you’re hearing in those movies is called the «dies irae». A Gregorian chant created by Catholic monks around the 13th century. It was used for one specific mass: funerals.

«Dies irae» translates from Latin to «Day of Wrath». That’s the day Catholics believe God will judge the living and the dead and decide whether they go to heaven or hell for eternity.

Alex Ludwig: It really is the sort of fire and brimstone passage that’s talking about the day of reckoning where in essence the decision is being made whether you’re going to heaven or you’re going to hell.

Reporter: That’s Alex Ludwig, a musicologist and professor from the Berklee College of Music who keeps a big list of dies irae references in movies.

Alex Ludwig: The musical material and the text combine together to create this sort of ominous sort of sense of dread.

Reporter: Over the next few hundred years, the Church’s influence spread considerably, and the Day of Wrath started popping up in works of art outside the church, like Mozart’s 1791 symphony «Requiem», influenced by the music of funerals.

In 1830, French composer Louis-Hector Berlioz took the dies irae’s cultural capital to a new level. In his «Symphonie fantastique», he lifted the melody but left out the words. Berlioz’s story isn’t set in a church or funeral — it’s about an obsessive love, in which the main character dreams that the lover he murdered has come back as a witch to torment him.

Alex Ludwig: The movement is called «The Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath». And so it’s set at midnight in a graveyard, and there are all these creepy spooky pieces of music, including the dies irae. What better piece of spooky music to play? Because this is a piece of music that already had these connotations behind it.

Reporter: Other great composers added versions of the dies irae to their works too, like Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s Totentanz, or Dance of the Dead, inspired by this medieval painting depicting suffering and death, or Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem.

And then we have the early silent films. Where the dies irae is then extracted even further and used as a sort of sample or sort of reference to dark, ominous actions taking place on screen.

Silent films were often accompanied by full orchestras, playing songs that helped propel soundless stories along. Like 1927’s Metropolis, a silent German sci-fi about a dystopia full of robots and destruction — which uses the dies irae in a particularly dramatic moment.

As films started incorporating sound, the dies irae kept being used as a shorthand for something grim. Like in It’s a Wonderful Life and Star Wars: A New Hope. But perhaps its most iconic use is in The Shining.

Alex Ludwig: Everyone knows The Shining is a horror film, and it’s like, that’s the perfect signifier for the dies irae.

The dies irae has come a long way from 13th-century funerals to scary movies.

That’s because there’s something about those four notes that makes us feel uncomfortable.

Let’s talk about the music. The chant is in what’s called Dorian mode — and we don’t have to dig into all the ancient modes like that — but today, if you would play those first four notes, you would say that that’s in a minor mode. Minor music has always had this connotation of sadness, of darkness.

Reporter: If you look at the actual notes, you’ll see that F and E are half steps apart, right next to each other.

Alex Ludwig: Our ears are trained not to like those sounds together.

Reporter: Plus, the notes descend, getting deeper as the phrase progresses.

Alex Ludwig: Musical lines that descend are sad whereas music that ascends, that rises, is much happier.

Reporter: Combine these three things together and you’ve got an inherently spooky song — even without all the fire and brimstone.

If you talk to a music professor like Alex, they’ll tell you the dies irae is everywhere. And it is — but maybe not in places untrained ears will catch. The phrase has become so culturally ingrained that even a modified version — like the theme to The Exorcist — or a shortened version, like the Nightmare Before Christmas can suggest the same scary feeling.

Alex Ludwig: It’s just that it, it fascinates me that this piece of music still gets used. I’m still hearing them. I’m still adding films to my list.

• A Gregorian chant — traditional religious music that people sing in church
• a monk /mʌŋk/ — a religious man who lives in a monastery
• a mass — a religious ceremony
• ominous /ˈɒmɪnəs/ — making you believe that something bad will happen
• a sense of dread /dred/ — a feeling of worry about something that could happen
• to torment /tɔː(r)ˈment/ — to make someone suffer
• a graveyard — a place where people are buried

At first glance, this painting by Picasso appears to be a joyful celebration of joie de vivre, a perfectly balanced classical composition of three dancers. It was painted in France during the roaring 1920s, probably in Paris. See the woman on the left. She looks like she’s doing the Charleston. This picture is more complicated than it first appears. What seems to be an exuberant celebration of life is in fact a savage dance of death echoing traditional European medieval engravings. This is a painting about raw emotions: lust, guilt and grief, painted at a time when Picasso had fallen out of love with his first wife Olga.

It may also tell the story of a violent love triangle. Look at the top right-hand corner of the picture. You can see the silhouette of a man’s profile. This is Ramon Pichot, an artist and friend of Picasso’s in the early years when he was living a dissolute bohemian life in Paris. In 1901, Pichot was involved in a tragedy between a young woman called Germaine Gargallo and Picasso’s friend, the artist Carlos Casagemas. Germaine had been a popular artist model, and Casagemas had fallen passionately in love with her. When she rejected him for Pichot, he tried to kill her before shooting himself in the presence of horrified friends. The event had a profound effect on the young Picasso, and 24 years later, when Ramon Pichot died, Picasso completed «The Three Dancers» as a way of exorcising the demons the tragedy had unleashed.

• The Charleston — an early 20th-century dance
• an engraving — a picture made by cutting a design into a metal plate, putting ink on it, and pressing it onto paper
• to echo something — to express ideas that someone else has expressed
• lust — a very strong sexual desire
• guilt — a feeling of shame because you have done something wrong
• grief — a feeling of sadness because someone died
• a bohemian lifestyle — living in a way typical for creative people who don’t follow conventions
• to have a profound effect on someone — to have a strong effect
• horrified — very scared
• to exorcise the demons — to do something that will help you to forget about a bad experience
• to unleash — to set something free