The Black Death, the first and most severe plague of a global pandemic lasting from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, was one of the most terrifying moments in European history. Great swathes of the population were killed by this unrelenting pestilence, with estimates suggesting that between 62% and 75% of the population died from the disease in some regions of Tuscany, for example. Such a profound event had well-documented social and political consequences that shaped the foundations of the burgeoning early-modern world, and helped bring about significant changes in the social strata underpinning societal functions. It also equipped the modern world with the original outbreak narrative, which has continued to haunt the European consciousness for the centuries that have followed.

This undoubtedly terrifying period, dominated by the Black Death and immortalized in historical documents and filmic media, has become the backdrop for countless depictions, both factual and fictional across a range of media. In short, the Black Death symbolizes one of the most important medievalist tropes over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, creating an image of the medieval world as one that is preoccupied with the apocalypse, prone to descending into superstitious and ritual acts, and preoccupied with death itself, all in fear of God. It is a bleak site with great potential for narrative expediency, and is a furrow that continues to be ploughed in a range of films and, most strikingly, in recent video-game series reliant on the outbreak narrative. Music plays an integral role in these depictions, acting as a key device in the medievalization of filmic and media spaces and offering some interesting insights into our modern perceptions of the sound of the past, especially that associated with the end times.

This essay examines approaches toward the scoring of the musical past in two films set during the first wave of the Black Death – taken in this article as the fourteenth-century bubonic plague epidemic – and considers the wider function of sound in these filmic narratives, their uses of pre-existent or period-style newly composed pastiche music, and the layering of medievalism at play in their atmospheric soundscapes.