Bernard Herrmann is most famous for his scores of Hitchcock movies, but his compositions include a variety of movie themes, including fantasy movies.

He said about composing for films: 

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

Several years ago, I  picked up an album out of curiosity since it contained the music of Psycho. I was knocked out by the string only orchestral music, which he chose "...to compliment the black-and-white photography of the film with a black-and-white score". Of the famous shower scene music, he commented:

People laugh when they learn its just violins, and that’s interesting to me. It shows that people are so jaded that if you give them cold water they wonder what kind of champagne it is. It’s just the strings doing something every violinist does all day long when he tunes up.

Since that first album, I have picked up several others. I am also fond of his fantasy film compositions, for his use of unusual instruments. He used xylophones for the skeleton duel in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Describing his composition of Journey to the Center of the Earth, he said "For the scene involving the dangerous serpent, I resurrected an obsolete medieval instrument called a serpent, which has been dropped from modern contemporary orchestras".

He was born in 1911 and died in 1975, on the night that he completed the final recording of the score for The Taxi Driver. A Juliard student, he was a director of the CBS radio in the 30's and followed Orson Welles to Hollywood to compose his first score for Citizen Kane. He can be seen directing the orchestra in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

I love the dark side of his music and its freshness, but I believe I fell a bit in love with him when I heard the score for Fahrenheit 451 with its sweet longing. When you see the following list, you will realize that you have heard several of his scores. I recommend getting some of his CD’s so that you can appreciate the music for its own unique qualities. All the following scores listed below are available on CD’s of music (some are collections of scores) actually conducted by Herrmann. There are also tribute albums of his music with other conductors.

NOTE: I recently completed an excellant biography of Sondheim called "Stephen Sondheim - A Life" by Meryle Secrest.  He is quoted as saying, "It's an open secret that the music for Sweeney is in homage to Hermann's language."  It certainly clarified for me why I chose the two of them as my favorite composers.