Excerpts

FOREWORD When breaking down what makes a horror movie work (or not), it is easy to bypass one of its most important elements. The script, the atmospheric lighting and lens choice, the cast, the visual and makeup effects, and the editorial approach all are important ingredients when leading the audience down the dark path to their deepest fears. But a singularly crucial piece of the puzzle is usually the last one to be locked in: the musical score. Music can make or break a film; it can make a good movie - of any genre - great. Or it can make a mediocre or crummy film better. Or, it can just sit there in a puddle of its own lifeless blood. Film music is its pulse, and when the right film and composer meet, magic happens. Movies are visceral, experiential. Music may be mathematical on charts, but, from its beginnings with the heartbeats of the tribes around the campfire to the fantastic digital samples and electronic aural creations that never existed in nature, it amplifies our emotions, and digs in deep to primal places that words and pictures cannot easily access. Even when they were silent, movies always had a soundtrack. In the pre-Vitaphone days, score sheets were distributed with the films to the cinemas, and the music was performed live - on giant Wurlitzer pipe organs in the most elegant theaters, or an out-of-tune Steinway upright in the more modest locations. They were, for the most part, consistent in that regard. Tension is built as much through sound as through image, and in some ways even more. Just as the storytelling tools of cinema have evolved over the years to become a language of their own, so too has the metamorphosis of film music led us to expect - or not - the traps being laid by the score. Some aspects of those are obvious: the loud discordant chord crashing onto the jump scare, the long held note warning us of something awful to come. Those are simple staples of the shocker, to the point of being self-parodying. But the soundscapes woven by the composer may also create an unsettling dread, a rich, deep, emotional experience that follows us home from the theater to haunt us a bit longer. Music has always been crucial for me, and it has allowed me to cover numerous cinematic sins I might have committed without anyone noticing. John Carpenter once told me that it's easy to make somebody jump, to shock the audience. All he has to do is run black leader through a projector silently, then hit a white frame and a loud noise, and the work is done. But that's merely a simple jump. And it's ironic that Carpenter was the first filmmaker I ever saw recording a musical score for a movie, and neither of us realized that he was changing the course of horror film music at the time. I was interviewing him in a tiny recording studio in Hollywood in 1978, and he was alone, hunkered over a synthesizer, scoring Halloween. The most important part of a film score is to do its work in concert with the movie it accompanies; it doesn't need to stand alone on a soundtrack album, though it's nice when it does. But sometimes, something magic comes from a soundtrack that won't sound great on your car stereo. Consider, for example, the "score" that Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell did for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre back in 1974. It is a soundscape, conducted noises and disturbing audio accompaniment to one of the most powerful and frightening films of all times. And Tobe made it very clear that he never played an instrument, though he did an amazing job on those skins and blades and bones. Groundbreaking scores that help a movie to terrify are plentiful, from Bernard Herrmann's black-and-white string chillers in Psycho to Jerry Goldsmith's melodic-and-atonal sound bed for Alien. Carpenter's Halloween showed you could make great music without great cost (or an orchestra) - a point driven home by Claudio Simonetti and his band Goblin, in his scores for Dario Argento and many others. I was a singer in a progressive rock band before I began writing and making films and television, but I always loved the full, organic sound of an orchestra for my films. I had the experience of a full orchestra on my first directing job, a Disney TV movie called Fuzzbucket, as well as on my one directorial effort for the TV show Amazing Stories, called "Life on Death Row." There is nothing more exciting than being on a studio recording stage with a studio orchestra! The power of it can be overwhelming. When I finally was able to direct my first feature, the timeless classic Critters 2: The Main Course (Me? Sarcastic?), it was important to have an orchestra, despite our very slender budget. We were creating Norman Rockwell's America, after all, in a Spielbergian world, and a 1988 synthesizer would not cut it. In our first collaboration, Nicholas Pike pulled together a non-union 40-piece orchestra and made magic. I'm told that Spielberg's editor Michael Kahn used that score as temporary music on Steven's films for many years to come. Another side of the film music coin is scoring by songs. In the miniseries I directed of Stephen King's The Stand, for example, the opening pre-credit sequence is memorably set to Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," and I can't hear that song without thinking of that scene...[continues] Mick Garris Director / Writer / Producer Excerpted from Blood on Black Wax: Horror Soundtracks on Vinyl (Expanded Edition) by Aaron Lupton, Jeff Szpirglas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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