The Reading Chair: “Music by Max Steiner” by Steven C. Smith

(walmart.com)

One evening in the late 1960s, I was sitting in a friend’s living room in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, watching a haunted house movie on TV called Two on a Guillotine. I don’t recall being scared, but my friend’s sister was. As a supposedly horrific moment, accompanied by a distinctly demonic music chord flooding from below, her boyfriend, sitting next to her, remarked, “This isn’t scary. You…