Some of the best new classical music today is being written for the cinema,
a/k/a soundtracks: Discuss
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the "Tower Scene" is scored for **eight** French horns ! 
Needless to say, that's a fave of mine. Film composers seem to feel freer to score for unusual instrumentation -- I guess because they aren't worried about how it will all be paid for. Besides Hitchcock, Hermann scored a lot of epics -- Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, Citizen Kane. Stop-motion special effects guru Ray Harryhausen and Hermann often worked on the same films, where a superhuman/mythic aura was needed.
"Salommbo" was the fictional opera in which Kane's wife performed -- Hermann scored it for a huge, Wagnerian-style orchestra, and got a lyric soprano (i.e. a genteel chamber music singer) to be steamrollered by this behemoth. The result was that the singer appeared not to be up to snuff, which is what the story line required, but no musician had to give a deliberately bad performance. The same score was later recorded for LP with Tiri Te Kanawa (!) making it more than a fair fight, up to the final sinus-clearing high D.
I have (somewhere) a recording of the music from Beneath The Twelve-Mile Reef that includes a (rather badly played) serpent. I was disappointed to watch the film (itself disappointing) and hear that part played as a rather mundane trombone glissando ! I later learned from Wikipedia that Hermann first used the serpent in White Witch Doctor, portions of which I also have on recording -- but I don't remember any serpent. Hermann did a surprising amount of exploration in electronic sound effects and instrumentation as well, including the shower scene in Psycho and sound effects for The Birds.
According to the Wiki, several CDs have been released of Hermann's compositions, and some of his concerts from his radio career (which I never realized before was so extensive and influential). They weren't available when I first looked, so now I have to track them down. Anticipaaaaaaytion ....
See IMDB for a complete list.
Some intriguing bits here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Herrmann#In_popular_culture
ETA: Lots of BH now available at Amazon !