If you were asked to select the most unsettling television theme song ever composed, what would you go with? In the event that your answer ends up being Unsolved Mysteries, literally nobody on the planet is gonna have an argument for you. Not one person. However, should you be in the rare position of not knowing what we’re talking about right now, go ahead and listen to the terrifying intro music below—and, for Christ’s sake, turn on a light first.

Composers Gary Malkin and Michael Boyd wrote that haunting little tune you just heard back in the 1980s, and it’s been striking fear into the hearts of everyone who’s listened to it since. Believe it or not, even Malkin himself wasn’t immune to the song’s chilling effects. While speaking with the Los Angeles Times in 2020, Malkin recalled that after spending countless hours on the score and watching reenactments of murders and abductions in the process, he couldn’t get the melody out of his head. “I was destroyed for weeks,” he revealed, “I had horrible nightmares.”

Why the ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Theme Still Gives You the Creeps

But Malkin was far from the only one his music gave the creeps to. As he tells it, the folks at NBC had to deal with quite a few complaints over the years regarding kids being freaked out by the show’s opening credits. “We used to get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘Could you please change the theme music? Our children are terrified of it,’” Malkin remembered.

As for what it is that makes the Unsolved Mysteries theme so eerie, Malkin explained that he and Boyd used an interval called the tritone (a.k.a. the devil’s interval), a dissonant combination that, according to musicologist Neil Lerner, creates a sense of tension, ambiguity, and instability. Evidently, religious songs from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance avoided the tritone because it made people feel uneasy. Malkin and Boyd were also inspired by the sinister music featured in earlier horror movies, like John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme, for example.

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