Underscoring

I've read many times that the creepy, "sense of doom and dread" underscoring wasn't produced specifically for TBTWD, that it was stock music supplied by American International Pictures once they bought the distribution rights.

Lo and behold, I caught a rerun of the old Steve McQueen series "Wanted: Dead or Alive" last night and it featured the EXACT same underscoring! This show ended its three year run in 1961, a year before TBTWD was released. Obviously, Warner Brothers leased or sold the rights to this score to AIP, which was not uncommon at the time.

It was weird hearing those dreaded notes as McQueen hunted down the bad guy in a Western TV show, instead of in a laboratory where a decapitated head comes back to life.