The Ghosts of Halloween Future

By Doug Adams

Someone once described Halloween as the one time during the year that we can listen to our favorite soundtrack oddities without earning crossed-eyed glances from our peers. True or not, you've got to love any time of year dedicated to the art of out-weirding each other. Last year around this time I ran a couple of columns detailing classic Halloween-themed scores: Franz Waxman's Bride of Frankenstein, Vince Guaraldi's "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", and Howard Shore's Ed Wood, to name a few. This year I thought it would be fun to take a peek into the future of creepy scores to come.

Glass Dracula

As many of you will no doubt remember, it was just a few years ago that minimalist icon/some-time film composer Philip Glass composed a new score for Jean Cocteau's 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Due for a video release next year around Halloween is Glass' treatment of Tod Browning's Dracula (the 1931 Bela Lugosi classic). The new score has recently been recorded by the famed Kronos string quartet, with Glass supervising over the phone. Reportedly, 65 out of the film's 75 minutes have been scored. Of course, the original Dracula was almost entirely unscored. (Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake played as main title music and Wagner's Lohengrin was used as an opera source cue.) I'm sure that a few purists are going to cry foul here, claiming that the original film's lack of music lent it an unearthly stillness. I think it's true that Browning's film walks dangerously close to camp at times, and the music-deprived atmosphere pulls it back from the brink more than once. Still, I can't wait to see what Glass has done with a film so rich in imagery. It may undermine the intent of the original, but it could still be amazingly fresh and new. And it's not like they're gutting a masterpiece here...

Psycho Analysis

...which brings me to the next topic. High on our list of upcoming curios, we now have Danny Elfman adapting and producing Bernard Herrmann's original score for Gus Van Sant's new Psycho. Granted if anyone's going to adapt Herrmann for mainstream audiences, Elfman is probably among the most qualified. Still, it takes an industrial supply of guts to have anything to do with the remake of a film of Psycho's stature. At this point, however, it's become a cliche to question the wisdom behind this remake and its rumored changes. We'll see if it works when we see if it works. Still, one has to wonder how the music will function in this remake. The old war stories have it that Hitchcock was initially disappointed with Psycho, thus he turned it over to Herrmann looking to polish things up a bit. Herrmann's ingenious solution was to externalize everything implicit, but to do so it a way that was so un-obvious, so unobtrusive as to retain an air of the subliminal. In other words, he took everything the film suggested and put it into literal terms, but did so in such a way that one only noticed the effect in culmination.

But here's the rub: Audiences now know this film and everything it suggests. It's a classic, after all. Will today's filmmakers be willing to let the music say as much as it used to, or will they feel the need to do it all themselves with flashy modern camera and editing tricks? Herrmann's spilling triplets fuel the mental agony of Marion's car trip, his groaning mid-range chords elucidate Norman's dual anguish/pleasure in the aftermath of the shower murder. Will Van Sant et al be willing to purposely not say these things so that the music still can? Will they flatten out the driving shots so that Elfman can quote Herrmann's theme? Will they edit Norman's post-homicidal clean up slowly enough to let the music paint the dry naturalism of the pace? Modern film visuals have been designed to be so hyper-realistic, so all- encompassing, is the score going to be able to do anything other than reiterate and slash high violin Eb's for a murder or two?

Once again, while I'm not convinced of the wisdom of this project in general, I can't wait to see/hear the results. Too bad it'll be nearly Christmastime before this thing comes out.

Monster Mash

Speaking of delayed releases, Gods and Monsters has been in the can for a long time now, but has been jostled all over the release schedule, supposedly in an attempt to catch the attention of award committees. The film details the sad last days of James Whale, the director of such films as The Invisible Man, Frankenstein, and The Bride of Frankenstein. Carter Burwell's score definitely fits into a Halloween frame of mind, complete with a few stylistic nods to Waxman. The composer was kind enough to talk with me about the score last spring, and while the full piece will run in an upcoming FSM, here's a short, relevant excerpt:

"I thought that the music had to bear some relationship to, as you say, the Waxman-style scores, because Frankenstein is a recurring theme through it, and he scored The Bride of Frankenstein. I thought some of that Romanticism would be good also because it gives the play of death another dimension. In other words, [when you see] it with this type of music, hopefully you'll think of death more the way 19th Century Romantics did: as a Romantic concept, not the way we think of it in the late 20th Century as just a kind of inefficiency. That's certainly one reason for doing Romantic music for this movie. I think that it couches it in different terms when we deal with things like decay and death."

The score walks an odd line between hand wringing and sincerity, purposely dated and more modern writing, with the final balance coming out somewhere along the lines of heartfelt melodrama. It's got a definite sense of over- sized emotions, but they feel earned and genuine. Burwell's very personal harmonic style is bent around a parlor-style of piano writing, Viennese waltzes for solo violin, and, of course, some heart beat Waxman-stylings. I tend to prefer Burwell's work for smaller or more off-kilter ensembles, but this definitely qualifies as one of his most effective straightforward efforts. It's a tough deal to run a strain of high-strung emotionalism though genuinely touching music--at least it's difficult to do it and avoid camp--and Burwell does splendidly here. The score's not a showcase for tricky compositional chops, but it's a wonderful example of balancing everything that a film requires.

Anyway, when you're picking through your hoary old favorites this Halloween, be sure to keep one eye on the horizon. Seems there's some interesting stuff coming our way.

Happy Halloween!

Doug@filmscoremonthly.com