The Score
Long-time Cinefantastique columnist Randall Larson sounds off on the art of horror, fantasy and sci-fi soundtracks.
La-La Land Superhero Scores
La-La Land Records debuts BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, X-MEN 2, and THE PHANTOM extended movie score CDs.
Music for a Mockbuster: Scoring the Other Battle of L.A.
Millions of dollars and years of pre-production planning, filming, and post-production refinement went into the massive sci-fi blockbuster BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, currently storming theaters across the country; only a small fraction of that expense and time was lavished on its pretender, BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES. Arriving on home video today after a March 12 premier on the SyFy Channel, BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES was made by The Asylum, a movie production company known for making “mockbusters” – low-budget films synthesized quickly to capitalize on the release of the larger films they are imitating.
John Barry: A Wordless Poet Dies
On January 30, 2011, iconic – and very prolific – composer John Barry passed away, after being in ill health for some time. He was seventy-seven years old. There is little doubt a great many will be saddened at the loss of one of film’s truly cherished friends.
Barry was an emotionally introspective and poetic composer [...]
From Killer Crocs to Road Kill: The Horror Music of Rafael May
Australian composer Rafael May has made down-under horror cinema his own, with a trio of very powerful, very persuasive, and very scary Australian horror movie scores. He made a significant splash with his second feature film score, 2007’s BLACK WATER, an intensively suspenseful and powerfully directed film about a rogue saltwater crocodile, threatening three vacationers in [...]
The Tuneful Tentacles of Sharktopus: Composer Tom Hiel
Original movies airing on the SyFy Channel (formerly The Sci-Fi Channel) have gained a reputation for being the equivalent of the Roger Corman exploitation movies of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, only with better special effects thanks to the wonders of CGI. SyFy’s seemingly endless parade of killer critters and mega monsters perhaps [...]
Of Superheroes and Predators: John Debney Returns to Sci-Fi
Comedy has always been contrapuntal to chillers in John Debney’s career. The composer began in the early 1980s scoring Disney television and cartoon shows like SCOOBY-DOO and features such as JETSONS: THE MOVIE. These lighthearted scores were offset against Debney’s darker side, which revealed itself in such venues as the relentless horror music of [...]
The Score: Robert Carli on Survival of the Dead
Joining the ranks of Italian prog rockers Goblin and film composers Norman Orenstein, Reinhold Heil & Johnny Klimek, John Harrison, and a battalion of library music composers whose work has accompanied the walking dead in their nights, dawns, days, lands, and diaries of the dead as brought to shambling life by George A. Romero, is [...]
Brian Tyler’s Final Destination
Fourth in the franchise launched in 2000 by former X-FILES writers James Wong and Glen Morgan, THE FINAL DESTINATION (known during production as FINAL DESTINATION 4 and FINAL DESTINATION: DEATH TRIP) is the latest variation on the entertaining but formulaic story about a group of teens who seem to cheat death only to find that [...]
Erich Kunzel – A Fond Good-bye
It is with sorrow that we note the passing of Erich Kunzel at the age seventy-four. On September 1, 2009 the celebrated conductor of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra for well over thirty years was struck down by “cancer of the pancreas, liver and colon,” according to Chris Pinelo, a spokesman for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, [...]
The Score: All This and Halloween II – Interview with composer Tyler Bates
In his last few scores, composer Tyler Bates has watched the WATCHMEN and observed THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, spent a DAY OF THE DEAD and survived DOOMSDAY, but as potent – and as diverse – as those scores were, it’s been his work for Rob Zombie that continue to be his edgiest, evincing [...]
The Score: Scott Glasgow Enters The Gene Generation
Pearry Teo’s 2008 cyberpunk science fiction thriller, THE GENE GENERATION, builds an effective futuristic environment, borrowing liberally from BLADE RUNNER, MAD MAX, and other cinematic cyberpunk landmarks, while creating its own unique post-modern landscape. The film is greatly aided by an excellent musical score from award winning composer Scott Glasgow, which provides a great sense [...]
The Fantastique Film Music of Simon Boswell
British composer Simon Boswell has scored films that span a myriad of genres and styles, but it is his work for horror and fantasy cinema that stands out: the mid ‘80s giallo films of Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava, Clive Barker’s masterful horror film, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, the chilling atonality of INCUBUS, the hybrid cyberpunk riffings [...]
The Score: Symphonic Giallo – Marco Werba scores Dario Argento’s new thriller
The composer discussions his musical collaboration with the Italian master of horror.
Dario Argento has been a legend in Eurohorror cinema since the 1970s, and in many ways his films of that era, which include DEEP RED (1975), SUSPIRIA (1977), TENEBRAE (1982), PHENOMENA (1985) and others, define the giallo form – that uniquely Italian style of horror [...]
