Unknown photographer · Public domain

Herrmann changed what film music could do, abandoning the lush, illustrative scoring that dominated 1930s Hollywood for something more spare and psychologically pointed — the shrieking strings of Psycho's shower scene are his, as is the vertiginous score for Vertigo. He won an Academy Award for his first film score, The Devil and Daniel Webster, having come from radio as the composer for Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and went on to score Citizen Kane and eight more Hitchcock films across a four-decade career.