Figure caption, Watch: How does music on The Traitors manipulate your emotions?
Music correspondent Published 18 October 2026 Suspicion, intrigue, treachery, Claudia Winkleman. The Traitors has it all.
But the shadowiest of the show's shadowy secrets is its music.
Have you ever noticed how the soundtrack manipulates your perception? A sinister orchestral flourish hints at a double cross. A cheeky chord injects humour into a kitchen conflab.
As ever, though, you shouldn't trust what happens in the castle. The music can provide emphasis or act as misdirection, all at the producers' behest.
Duplicity was baked into the music from the beginning.
"I remember the BBC was quite reluctant to even think about a show with murder as a main feature, so I knew I didn't want the music to go really dark," says Sam Watts, who composed the opening theme and much of the incidental score (but is not responsible for the show's haunting cover versions of well-known pop songs... more on those later).
Watts, who had previously worked on Planet Earth and The Sarah Jane Adventures, pitched to work on the programme with only a basic idea of the set-up. It was only when he learned Winkleman was the host that he settled on his approach.
"They sent me a little shot they'd done of the opening with Claudia and the castle. That's when I knew it was going to be a bit camp and high drama and all the glorious things that Claudia brings to the show. So I just went with that - dark but fun."
Image source, Sam Watts Image caption, Sam Watts' Traitors theme helped to establish the show's identity
For the title sequence, the 44-year-old wanted something memorable. As a kid, his favourite song was Bernard Hoffer's gloriously over-the-top Thundercats theme , external , so that's the level he aspired to.
"I was trying to write something that signified the show was starting, so that people would run in from making their cup of tea in the kitchen to watch it.
"And I wanted a memorable melody that people could hum, because it helps with the identity of the show."
The Traitors theme is "one of the biggest pieces of music I've ever written", he says, recorded with a full orchestra and overdubbed with dozens of electronic elements to create a heightened, hyperreal atmosphere.
That bled into the 20 or so other pieces Watts wrote, which also appear in dozens of international spin-offs.
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The idea, he says, is that the whole hour feels like a film trailer, with viewers permanently waiting for the psychological pressure chamber to explode.
To achieve that, he employed several techniques of trailer music - most notably the " Braam ", a klaxon-like punctuation mark invented for Christopher Nolan's Inception (see video for a fuller exploration).
Show producer Sarah Fay took that concept and amplified it. "We wanted to just supersize it and make it feel like a drama, not like your usual reality [show]," she said in a rare interview with Metro , external when the first civilian series aired in 2022.
"We wanted to make it feel like that edge-of-your-seat cinematic drama with, you know, elements of Succession, and we wanted it to feel like Knives Out when you get into the castle!"
To achieve that, she commission…