Nick Zwar
Forumsvar Lagt Inn
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Innlegg
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On a related note, I’ve always been a bit weary of us Europeans “importing” Halloween traditions from the US.
On the other hand, as a European, I have always been fascinated by Halloween, and it’s one of my favorite holidays, though there is no real tradition for the holiday in continental Europe. Of course, Halloween is originally Irish, so it’s certainly European. Still, I like it, I’ve spent lots of time in the US and always enjoyed Halloween (I’ve even been on an incredibly large private Halloween party once that was later crashed by the police (just shortly after I had left… lucked out. 😀 ). I enjoy Halloween and I do take the month of October as an excuse for us to watch horror movies (though I’m not the biggest “horror” movie fan).
I like many “horror” scores, just as I like many “western” scores, or “science fiction” scores… but what is a “horror” score?
Leaving aside all the “science fiction” movies with horror elements (like ALIEN or THE THING), and just taking a look at what Lexica of “horror” movies tend to include, there are still many fine scores out there. Of course, I love THE OMEN scores (all of them, but my favorite may be DAMIEN – OMEN II), and classics such as Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. I could name lots… including such obvious classics as JAWS (which is often listed in horror encyclopedias), but to limit myself, here are five I chose to highlight today:PSYCHO by Bernard Herrmann
Just strings for a black & white movie, PSYCHO is still THE classic, perhaps the first truly “modern” horror movie (just thinking about how often I saw on many old VHS covers that sold the latest cheapo-slasher stuff like: “It started with PSYCHO, then came HALLOWEEN, and now it’s BLABLABLA”).
It’s also a tremendously modern score, fully concentrated on mood. Never tire of listening to it.POLTERGEIST by Jerry Goldsmith
This was my very first purchased Jerry Goldsmith score, and wow, what a first… THE OMEN was the Oscar-winning score for Goldsmith, but I find POLTERGEIST even more interesting. One of his most exciting scores. It’s at times ethereally beautiful as well as darkly menacing. “NIGHT OF THE BEAST” is one of my favorite cues ever… I really played that a lot as a teenager, wondering how so much fury could be jam-packed into just a couple of minutes.BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA by Wojciech Kilar
There have been many Dracula scores, such as those by Philip Glass, James Bernard, John Williams, to name just a few, but if I had to pick one, it would be this one. This sounds like music where the notes are hewn into stone—archaic, ancient, mysterious. I remember when I noticed Kilar’s name on the posters for the upcoming Dracula movie. I had one album of his at the time, the wonderful Le Roi et l’Oiseau. That was the only score of his that I knew, though I had read about some of his concert works (but not listened to them). Still, I was very much looking forward to this score, and it was everything I had hoped it would be.CAT PEOPLE by Roy Webb
Was this perhaps the first score for a horror movie that took a child’s lullaby as its core theme? Not sure, but the music is sublime. Roy Webb was really one of the unsung masters of the Golden Age film scores. This is a horror film score that plays, apart from the movie, as music that is both unsettling and soothing at the same time.SCARECROWS by Terry Plumeri
Now here’s a gem hardly anyone knows about. I sure didn’t know about it before Intrada released the score in 2009. I had no idea about the movie, nor did I know the composer, but I liked the cover, which is why I ordered the score. And it’s very good, very dense. I’ve seen the movie since—it came out in 1988, released in the days of endless Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween sequels—and there are quite a few things I liked about it:
First, it showed what you could do with a really low budget if you know how to use it. Then the movie eschews the clichés of the genre at the time and made something totally different: instead of beautiful teens that get stalked by invincible maniac killers, SCARECROWS pits a bunch of renegade mercenaries, who are on the run with two hostages after a successful robbery, against ominous killer scarecrows who lurk in cornfields. Far out and wonderfully creepy (when I saw the movie, I was actually overnight quite alone in a house far away from neighbors… so that certainly added to the movie’s effectiveness. 😀 ). And against a lot of 80s low-budget horror conventions, Terry Plumeri’s music is purely orchestral and relies on atmosphere and mood rather than stingers and dissonance. It’s creepy, eerie and spooky, and conjures up images of vast, deserted cornfields protected by menacing scarecrows.Yes, that’s true of course. Whereas classical music albums always (even in LP days) came with extended liner notes, the original soundtrack album releases usually didn’t have any. But that is because for the most part, especially in the 1970s to the 2000s, the “Original Soundtrack Album” was a promotional tie-in product. There is no room for a (critical) assessment, overview, and background information about the music or scoring process. That was not the audience these albums were made of. That’s like the “making of” featurettes on current movie releases often feature little more than a few actors telling each other how great working together was. It becomes more interesting when older movies get remastered releases, when you find sometimes very interesting features, background stories, etc. (With THE HEART OF DARKNESS documentary being almost as interesting as the movie APOCALYPSE NOW itself.)
So on those older soundtrack albums, you may get a nice note from the director (if you’re lucky), or nothing but a few stills and album credits. They were more produced like “pop” albums, where you usually only get a few stills of the artist and credits (and if you’re lucky, the lyrics of the songs, always liked that), more isn’t needed.
Though it’s been a while that I bought a soundtrack CD of a then more or less concurrent movie release… not sure… maybe INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY was the last one.Same with operas, I appreciate if there’s a libretto and summary of what’s going on and why who is singing what, since most operas are hard to follow if they are sung in a language you don’t understand and don’t see what’s going on. BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE is such a case where good liner notes (with translated libretto and stage directions) really help to “put you on the journey”.
I have the Marco Polo recording of Dimitri Tiomkin’s RED RIVER on my desk here, that has really good notes. There’s an introductory note by the conductor (William Stromberg), short notes about Tiomkin, notes about how the recording came about, quotes by Tiomkin himself and Christopher Palmer, notes about Howard Hawks and the movie, what Hawks was trying to accomplish and how that aligned with Tiomkin’s music, as well as a detailed track by track analysis of the complete score. That’s a lot packed into 30 pages or so.
I sure have lots of film music where I haven’t seen the movie, so I appreciate good liner notes that tell me something about the movie and how the music is generally applied and functions within it.
As I said, I don’t think there is just “one right way” for liner notes. Track by track analysis can make a lot of sense, especially when the film score is composed to picture with a clear compositional and dramatic narrative that reflects certain key moments, or when musical concepts and devices reflect key ideas of the movie. Also, often times I haven’t even seen the movie, so a general outline about the function of the music within the movie can be quite interesting. On the other hand, there is a lot of film music that is composed completely different. When a film score is more composed with certain moods or themes or doesn’t have a symphonic/narrative structure, a track by track analysis isn’t really important.
I think by and large the best liner notes give you insights about the music that are not readily obvious or background information (about the movie, the composer, the time when the music was composed, etc.).Interestingly, I see that — often, not always — the other way around. For soundtracks, they feature often very interesting in depth information and material not found elsewhere and quite a few insights, whereas — while I appreciate the booklet in classical recordings — they rarely offer information beyond what is already easily available in various books and concert guides anyway. (Just a generalization, of course.) That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy good booklets in classical music as well. In pop/rock, informative booklets are the exception to the rule to begin with.
I enjoy good booklets, ideally with lots of background information that places movie, music and composer in context. Some of the old Marco Polo releases had wonderfully exhaustive liner notes. I also enjoy when the booklet illuminates aspects of the film, music, and score that are not immediately obvious, or what the central themes and ideas of a score are, or about director/composer relationship, why unusual instrumentation was chosen, and, and…
They don’t have to be all the same either, sometimes a track by track analysis can make sense, at other times that would be boring. It depends on where the most interesting focus for notes might be. I sure learned a lot from good liner notes.Is that the right direction? Not sure anymore.
But I too like the score a lot, it’s a very nice score for a good movie.Yes, the Intrada is a straight re-issue of the original soundtrack album with the original poster art.
It’s a straight re-issue. (Couldn’t resist.)
That’s the cover I actually have, it’s not all that much different?
Yes, it’s a re-issue. That’s not the cover of the CD I have, but it’s the cover of the Intrada reissue of the score (both CD and digital release).
