While Bernard Herrmann is most famous for his movie scores for Alfred Hitchcock, he also composed scores for seven half-hour Twilight Zone episodes. Out of the 156 episodes of the series, 57 used either original scores or at least one piece of stock music by Herrmann. James G. Stewart once remarked on Herrmann's talents as a composer, stating that “not only was he a good showman, but he was also a great showman with his music, and he had an instinctive feeling from the very beginning of where music should and should not go in motion pictures, which is a rare thing.” In all of his scores—whether for film, television, or radio—Herrmann composed his musical cues by using the visual cues onscreen (or, in the case of radio, the plot cues in the dialogue).

This chapter will look at Herrmann's Twilight Zone scores and examine the use of his most frequent compositional attributes. In doing so, we will be able to gleam what these attributes are and the way that his music was conceived. As a result, we can get a sense of the way that his mind's ear worked and how he composed music that was appropriate for the science fiction and fantasy genre.

Herrmann once summarized his compositional technique in general, remarking that:

The majority of Herrmann's music, like the scores of Jerry Goldsmith, were heavily influenced by both his own feelings as well as the feelings that he wished the audience to get from the film.