Ennio Morricone

Morricone trained formally at Rome's Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, studying trumpet and composition, and spent years working as an arranger for Italian radio and pop records before his childhood friend Sergio Leone brought him onto a low-budget western that would change both of their careers. That western-scoring work established the unconventional instrumentation — whistles, gunshots, wordless vocals — that became his signature.

The maestro of Italian film music, from spaghetti westerns to art-house dramas, his brooding, minimal work for The Thing is one of his strangest and finest scores. A classically trained trumpeter, he composed more than 400 scores across a seven-decade career and is best known internationally for his collaborations with Leone on the Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West.

His score for The Thing was famously restrained at John Carpenter's specific request, built around a single pulsing synth note that mimics Carpenter's own signature style closely enough that many viewers assume Carpenter wrote it himself — an unusual instance of a legendary composer deliberately suppressing his own voice to serve a director's. He won an honorary Academy Award late in life before finally winning a competitive one for The Hateful Eight.