House joins the surprisingly short list of films that features a film composer among its characters. Unfortunately, although this character (simply called “Father”) is said by an unnamed Italian director to be better than Morricone, he plays a minor role. […]
Purportedly inspired by films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rollerball director Norman Jewison decided to largely eschew an original score in favor of using classical music. The supposed reasoning was to prevent the sci-fi movie from feeling dated, thereby undermining […]
The somewhat obscure English cannibal horror film Death Line (known as Raw Meat in the US) boasts one of the great opening tracks in film music. Blurred, grainy shots of seedy burlesque clubs meld with “Main Theme.” A fat, echoing […]
I used to watch quite a few martial arts/Kung Fu films when I was younger, but the practice fell by the wayside in subsequent years. Like many in the West, I eventually didn’t take the genre seriously, viewing it as […]
A warm air blows through Los Angeles county; through the orange groves, the valley, the city, and everywhere in between. It is inevitable, undeterrable. It is Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Chinatown, led by the trumpet playing of the legendary Hollywood […]
Home is supposed to be safe, comforting, “where the heart is.” Horror films push against this, perhaps none more famously than The Amityville Horror, in which Lalo Schifrin’s score shows us that home is where hell is. Schifrin makes frightening […]
It may not be surprising that listeners, when hearing a horror score, expect the music to be “scary.” But it’s not a necessity. Pino Donaggio, in his score for Carrie, focuses on the film’s sweet, tender moments rather than the […]
The world is full of noise. On David Lynch and Alan Splet’s score for Eraserhead, that noise is the industrial chaos of a blue-collar nightmare. The score begins with howling winds and a slow, low rumbling like the maw of […]
The films of David Lynch have always been renowned for their bizarre, surreal nature. However, this attention typically overlooks the music of his films, which are as equally strange. Take, for example, Tractor’s score for Lynch’s early short film The […]
Film music can be incomprehensible when detached from the underlying film. Snippets of ascending strings building tensions, rhythmic unaccompanied drums, or ominous rumbling synths build atmosphere for the images on screen. But they have trouble standing on their own. They […]
The history and study of film music is largely a European and American centric one. Even today, most Western audiences are only familiar with composers from these two areas, largely ignoring the film music produced throughout the rest of the […]
Suspiria is madness. The mechanism largely driving this madness is Goblin’s score and, most importantly, their”Suspiria” theme. In the film’s opening moments doe-eyed ballet student Suzy Banyon arrives alone in a foreign land. Immediately Goblin begins pummeling her with bursts […]