Halloween Diversions

Hey, y'all.



Well, Halloween's coming up. It's one of my favorite times of the year and -- wouldn't you know it? -- they don't celebrate it here in Burkina Faso (duh). So, I'm doing what I can to enjoy the Halloween season my own way. One of my favorite things about Halloween is that it gives me the opportunity to spout off about my ardent love for horror films without people looking at me like I'm deranged and sadistic. And, seeing as how school still hasn't started yet for me (I know, right?), I have a lot of time to spout off! So, with that being said, I'm using this post to kick off a month of blogging diversions here at Waggadoogoo, wherein I will pontificate and educate on the essentials of horror cinema. Today, I present to you my own personal list of ...

THE TOP 15 HORROR FILM SOUNDTRACKS OF ALL TIME!

15. Pino Donaggio, Dressed to Kill (1980)
Lush, romantic, and devastatingly gorgeous, Pino Donaggio’s main title theme from Dressed to Kill immediately sets the tone for an admirably complex and multilayered horror shocker that is arguably the best imitation of Alfred Hitchcock ever committed to celluloid (thanks to enterprising director Brian DePalma). Donaggio’s work here is an ornate showcase for full-bodied string instruments of all sorts, with some solid woodwinds thrown in for punctuation. The dreamy ensemble creates slinky, swooping motifs that underscore the elegant-but-grotesque New York City atmosphere portrayed on the screen, while hinting at the dark and prurient secret at the heart of the film’s story. Best tracks: “The Shower (Theme from ‘Dressed to Kill’)” and “The Forgotten Ring/The Murder.”

14. John Harrison, Day of the Dead (1985)
Definitely a product of the mid-‘80s, John Harrison’s score for the underrated third entry in George Romero’s Dead Trilogy is rife with urgent synth beats. The compositions are vaguely gloomy, with heart-pounding throbs and lamenting keyboards set in a minor key. At the same time, however, the music is full-bodied and sinewy, and some slow and vibrant synthesizer strings give us a glimmer of hope in the apocalyptic pastiche, as if a higher power is reassuring us that we’ll make it out alive if we’re fast and resourceful enough. There’s also a delicious, subtle Caribbean flavor to the overall texture of the music, perhaps employed to match some of the locations used in the film. Now I know what a digital steel drum sounds like.

13. Riz Ortolani, Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Piercing string jabs set on reverb define this eerie and uncomfortable soundtrack composed by horror and cult vet Riz Ortolani for Lucio Fulci’s astounding giallo Don’t Torture a Duckling. Ortolani, who also made some jazzy Christmas music in his day, rounds out his compositions with some cool, quiet, and ominous saxophone moans, which at times sound perverse and resonate brilliantly with the crisis of divine morality that serves as the subtext of the film. Audacious, revolting, and inappropriately romantic and sentimental … if that’s wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

12. Richard H. Band, The House on Sorority Row (1983)
If you didn’t know any better, you’d be convinced that this was a Pino Donaggio score. With its robust string and woodwind compositions textured with deceptively playful music box jingles, Richard H. Band’s score for The House on Sorority Row is reminiscent of Donaggio’s work on Tourist Trap, another early-‘80s slasher gem. However, this shouldn’t shortchange Band’s work. He creates a wonderfully haunting, childlike theme that crops up in various manifestations throughout the energetic and efficient soundtrack.

11. Tim Krog, The Boogey Man (1980)
In his soundtrack for the schlocky supernatural-slasher effort The Boogey Man, Tim Krog proffers a murky, cacophonous electronic thunderstorm. It’s foreboding and solemn, but also strangely rhythmic enough that you might catch yourself tapping your foot to it. In the end, it sounds like Krog initially wanted to create an electropop album, which he then simmered in the extracts of his greatest nightmares, adding just a dash of delectable sleaze to fit the early-‘80s template. Fans of the soundtrack for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which is featured further down) should definitely pick this one up. Best tracks: “The Boogey Man (Version 2)” and “Gloom.”

10. Lalo Schifrin, The Amityville Horror (1979)
So effective that it was used in the trailers for the shoddy 2005 remake, Lalo Schifrin’s Oscar-nominated score for The Amityville Horror is a mortifying look at demonic possession’s clash with the Christian faith and nuclear family values. Indeed, this is a discarded score that was originally intended for the The Exorcist, a film that, with the exception of “Tubular Bells” and a few other selections, ended up being score-less. As much as I love Schifrin’s score, it’s the chilling, stiff silences in The Exorcist that make that film so scary to me—I think a formal soundtrack would have felt obtrusive against the proceedings that are shown on film. The music works brilliantly in Amityville, though, spurring ample hyperactive demon-o-mania for a film about one of the most sensationalized news stories of the modern era. Best tracks: “Main Title” and “The Ax.”

9. Goblin, Suspiria (1977)
Welcome to Hell. It really is a shame that Italian horror auteur Dario Argento had a falling out with the equally Italian and equally brilliant Ennio Morricone after Morricone scored Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. However, this presents a conundrum for me: if Argento and Morricone hadn’t parted ways, chances are the director never would have crossed paths with Goblin, a gifted, innovative, and possibly psychotic Eurogroup who created harrowing scores for much of Argento’s later work—the most famous of which being the one they recorded for Suspiria, a jewel in Argento’s repertoire. In short, Goblin’s Suspiria score is just as harrowing, disorienting, and frenetic as the film itself, feverishly weaving together bombastic synth organ blasts, feral guitar warbles, out-of-control percussion, and a chorus of demons—I swear they mined the pits of Hades to assemble these singers. Best tracks: “Suspiria” and “Sighs.”

8. Ennio Morricone, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Quintessential Morricone—yet, at the same time, not. Ennio Morricone’s score for the box office bombtacular Exorcist II: The Heretic has most of the aural elements one can find in a great deal of the composer’s work: the female singers/moaners, the melodic Spanish guitar, and even some cracking whips that sound like they were leftover from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly soundtrack. However, there’s something astonishingly different about this. It’s so much more ethereal than a lot of Morricone’s other scores—particularly the ones he composed for Westerns, which tended to be bold celebrations of machismo mixed with old-school romance. The Exorcist II score is unusually ghostly and organic, at times sounding like something that standard audio equipment would be incapable of recording. What ultimately makes it a fantastic musical work, though, is its distortion of implacable ethnic chants and motifs into convincing horror movie strains. It’s as if Morricone did his research at a haunted madrasa. Best tracks: “Seduction and Magic” and “Night Flight.”

7. John Carpenter, Halloween (1978)
Ah, yes. The obvious, but deservedly classic, entry. What can really be said about Halloween and director John Carpenter’s stunningly spare and sinister soundtrack that hasn’t been said a thousand times before? Not much, other than that both the film and the score are virtuosic feats of strength, both reverent of the past while breaking new ground, and still managing to enrapture and swoop audiences off their bearings thirty years later. I read some silly statistic a little while ago that noted Carpenter’s Halloween theme as the most-downloaded cell phone ringtone of all time, beating out the 50 Cents and the Rihannas of the world. If that’s not achieving cultural resonance, I don’t know what is.

6. Bernard Herrmann, Vertigo (1958)
A sophisticated and sumptuous meditation on desperate love, obsession, and deception, Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, was decades before its time, providing a serious and uncompromising musical template that would be echoed in complex adult thrillers for decades to come, from The Silence of the Lambs to Basic Instinct. Despite this prescience, Hermann’s score also features some wonderfully exuberant romantic swells that are utterly germane to Old Hollywood, which compel you to observe that, “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

5. John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s score for the undervalued and highly enjoyable B-movie cheddarfest that is Halloween III: Season of the Witch is an exemplary work of electronic wizardry—or should I say “witchery”? Truly a score that stands on its own without any visual accompaniment, this is a tech noir triumph that could easily have been independently released as a concept album, summoning its own feelings of anxiety in the decadent, future-obsessed, and globally industrializing 1980s. The remarkable and supple synth work on display here is at once magnificent and loathsome; the computerized blips sneer at you with their preprogrammed perfection, which is astutely in line with the megalomaniacal, dystopian vein of the film and, indeed, also with James Cameron’s disillusioned visions of technology, which he portrayed with chilling immediacy two years after the release of Halloween III in the original Terminator film. Best tracks: “Main Title,” “Chariots of Pumpkins,” and “Drive to Santa Mira.”

4. Jerry Goldsmith, Alien (1979)
Droning strings off in the distance, echoing the vast, empty expanse of space: brilliant. Soft dabs of coordinated flute bursts, mimicking the complex beeps and chatterings of omnipresent electronic interfaces: masterful. Slowly rumbling timpani accompanying the foreboding flyby of a state-of-the-art, yet brutishly utilitarian, starship: extraordinary. Cold, strange, and isolating, Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Alien is perfectly suited for the film, in which the audience encounters a futuristic vision that supplants the wonderment of the ray guns and lamé suits of Buck Rogers with a sober, workaday look at a cargo liner’s space crew and its dreadful discovery of something so horrifyingly … alien. Goldsmith’s music isn’t ceremonious or operatic. It asserts grandeur, to be sure, but is ultimately tempered by pessimistic, reticent anxieties, reinforcing the futility of the crew’s efforts to eliminate the evil, slimy presence. A gothic masterpiece.

3. Bernard Herrmann, Psycho (1960)
Assaulting and harrowing with frenzied in-your-face precipitation. Bernard Hermann’s authoritative superscore for Alfred Hitchcock’s endlessly revered slasher-shocker is at the top of the heap of my many favorite film soundtracks. Psycho was as much of a departure for Hermann as it was for Hitchcock: gone are the amorous, hazy swells of the Vertigo soundtrack (number 6 on this list), replaced here by aggressive and unbelievably percussive strings and a jolting dissonance that you can cut with a knife—no pun intended.

2. John Williams, Jaws 2 (1978)
If John Williams created the most memorable and influential soundtrack theme in modern cinematic history for the original Jaws, he further refined his all-too-familiar shark-stalking motif for the 1978 sequel, immersing it in a symphonic palette of pleasant new melodies whose adventure-filled sum is even greater than its exquisitely varied parts. Along with providing pitch-perfect accompaniment that adapts to the film’s oscillations between brooding melodrama and slasher film histrionics, Williams’ score brings unquestionable elegance to the otherwise drive-in-worthy Jaws 2. Also, given its triumphant crescendos and conventional string and brass ensemble (including some mellifluous harps), this is one of the first works in Williams’ oeuvre where the composer went “mainstream,” setting the stage for the grandiose, hummable, and audience-friendly scores he created for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, et cetera. Williams’ all-American latter days, which saw their beginnings in Jaws 2, are worlds away from the eclectic and downright odd music he created for Robert Altman’s Images. Best tracks: “Finding the ‘Orca’ (Main Title),” “The Menu,” and “Ballet for Divers.”

1. Harry Manfredini, Friday the 13th (1980)
Okay, I’ll be honest: Harry Manfredini’s work on the Friday the 13th films isn’t the most original material in music history. He pays distinct homage to Bernard Herrmann, and maybe Krzysztof Penderecki, in his compositions, and I swear he even rips off the Jaws theme at one point in Friday the 13th Part 2. I hardly care about any allegations of pilfering, though, because Manfredini’s music throughout the early half of the Friday the 13th series is just so damn appropriate and effective. Raw, rough, and vicious strings coalesce into a homegrown work of horrific genius that firmly implants you among the imposing trees and darkened cabins of that deadly campground. Just like the films, Manfredini’s music is visceral, not cerebral; its primary duty is to provoke a cheap reaction rather than stimulate the intellect—sorry, Penderecki aesthetes—and it does so with remarkable succinctness. Ki ki ki, ma ma ma …

Oh, and an honorable mention for Jay Chattaway’s oppressive synth score for Maniac.