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JEEPERS CREEPERS and Classic German Horror Music on CD

This Week's Recommendation

Bennett Salvay's eerie and eclectic little score for JEEPERS CREEPERS, Victor Salva's affectionately and dynamically delineated monster movie, has come out on new label called Free Inc (3416), available through Percepto Records (www.percepto.com). Salvay, who has done a fair amount of TV work since the early 1980s, scored Salva's previous RITES OF PASSAGE and NATURE OF THE BEAST.

JEEPERS CREEPERS is just intensely eerie. The main title is frightening and spooky. Mesmerizing ambiences of electronics and acoustics reverb and resonate to create a claustrophobic enclave of musical terror. In "The Truck Attacks" Salvay introduces his ostinato for the malevolent vehicle which is the monster's first guise. Low-end piano pulsations amid eerie violin shrivelings and raging brass emerge and eventually become a brutal and brutishly beaten rhythm for panic, a relentlessly pounding heartbeat of thirsty evil. "Bone Appetite" growls with sinister, snarling brass and low, onrushing synth and percussion, accented by upswirls of violin. "The House of Pain," wherein young Kenny falls through the pipe and discovers the Creeper's deadly domicile, is an exercise in studied terror. Strains and shards of sound writhe and squirm about, quietly, building... the Truck motif surging in briefly as Kenny fights off a not-quite-dead victim of the Creeper... then more brooding mysterioso, odd and clever usings of strings and such, until finally the walls of the cave are revealed, with growing undulations of bassoon, low strings, and percussion, scurrying pizzicato strings, and an awakening tide of orchestral revelation, to display dozens of years of the Creeper's handiwork in a nightmarish and apprehensive moment of honest horror. A terrific moment in the film and outstanding bit of composition.

Director Victor Salva can explain it better than I can: "Both myself and my composer... wanted the score for JEEPERS CREEPERS to feel like a very fresh entry in the horror music genre while at the same time having some of the terrific narrative qualities of the classic horror scores of the '40s and '50s," writes Salva in the CD booklet. "We wanted an orchestra score that harkened back to those days when a brassy and locomotive orchestra pounded out the beats of the approaching beast with full symphonic support. At the same time we wanted it original and shocking like our film." Salva describes how Salvay spent time early in postproduction to experiment and create some of the more unusual acoustic musical effects he created for the score. "Bennett then artfully interpolated into an already full symphonic score a multitude of... scrapes, bends, and strange orchestral thrusts, including a bowed piano that actually howls and moans, an entire string section playing with alligator clips on their instruments, and some writing for the little used but oh so evocative contra bassoon."

In addition to nearly all of Salvay's score, the CD closes with the old time pop tunes, "Jeepers Creepers" (the connection of which to the film and its monster is never really made clear, until you figure out that the whole story is really a macabre joke, built around the "where's you get those eyes" line in the second stanza) and "Here Comes the Boogey Man" that closes the film, plus a six-second bonus track: a couple of toots from the Creeper's fiendishly marauding REO truck.

SOUNDTRAX NEWS

Italian film [IMG2R]composer Mario Nascimbene died on January 6^th, at the age of 88. Nascimbene was best known in the USA for his prehistoric Hammer scores ONE MILLION YEARS BC, WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH and CREATURES THE WORLD FORGOT each score notable for its inventive use of new instruments (including clacking jawbones and tons of percussion and choir), as well as costume adventures pictures like Hammer's VENGEANCE OF SHE, THE VIKINGS, SOLOMON AND SHEBA, A FAREWELL TO ARMS, BARABBAS and DOCTOR FAUSTUS. Nascimbene had a reputation for creating new and inventive instrumentation one of his film scores, for a movie about office workers, had a main theme build around the staccato notes of a typewriter; yet he also crafted sublime melodies, as much of BARABBAS (parts of which were composed, sans credit, by Ennio Morricone) indicates. The only genre Nascimbene never really got into was that of spaghetti westerns and his approach to one of those would have been a very interesting thing to hear. Most of Nascimbene's major scores are available on CD from DRG (http://www.drgrecords.com) in the U.S. and Beat in Italy.

The Golden Globe Awards, film musically at any rate, continue to disappoint and confound.  Not to slight Craig Armstrong, a capable and impressive composer whose efforts at linking the varied songs and providing a rich and poignant symphonic underscore to MOULIN ROUGE were indeed worthy of recognition, but to ignore such valid and astounding musical works as John Williams' profoundly poignant A.I., James Horner's wistful and elegant A BEAUTIFUL MIND, Howard Shore's richly interwoven LORD OF THE RINGS, Christopher Young's ethereal and fragile THE SHIPPING NEWS (one of his best efforts to date), and even Hans Zimmer's rhythmic melodies for PEARL HARBOR in favor for what is in reality a song-linking score (albeit a good one) is a true shame, and more evidence that the award voters (and just wait till we see what they do for the Oscars) don't really understand music, but they remember songs and that's almost always what has stood out in award winners like this.

The BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nominees (U.K.'s equivalent of our Oscars and Emmys combined into a single show), just named, also follow suit: Armstrong for MOULIN ROUGE, Shore for LOTR, Angelo Badalamenti for MULHOLLAND DRIVE, but also Yann Tierson for a thoroughly engaging and delightful score for AMELIE, and Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell for SHREK (that was nice recognition). We shall see what their musical memories result in come award night, February 24^th.

The score for Lion's Gate's MONSTER'S BALL, composed by Asche & Spencer (a commercial music and sound design company launched by former drummer Thad Spencer), will find a CD release on Lion's Gate Records on February 12^th. No, the film isn't a monster movie about a weird social gathering, but is a romantic thriller with Billy Bob Thornton as a racist warden who falls in love with the black widow (Halle Barry, and after SWORDFISH who wouldn't?) of a man he's just executed. Spencer's music is taught, pianistic and percussive, a neat rhythmic and tonal ambience that lays down an effectively moody carpet of underlying tenseness and regret.

Gary Chang's score to Stephen King's recent ABC mini-series, ROSE RED, sounded creepy enough. Chang also scored ABC's last King mini-series, STORM OF THE CENTURY. Neither score garnered a CD soundtrack, unfortunately, and Chang is represented on CD with nearly zero soundtrack releases. Of more than 60 scores (the majority being TV-movies, probably accounting for this scarcity of CD releases) only five found a release on CD, including the Michael Caine macabre comedy, A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM, and the 1996 remake of ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. Perhaps a combo soundtrack of these two King scores might mode well for a future release...?

The score [IMG3L]for THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, Mark Pellington's science fiction-esque thriller (based on true events... right!) comes to CD with music by the duo of Tom Hajdu and Andy Milburn (known as TomAndAndy) on LAK 33694.

James Newton Howard completes his trilogy of Disney films (he scored both last summer's DINOSAUR and this year's ATLANTIS) next year when he scores TREASURE PLANET.

Percepto Records will follow-up their Vic (ADDAMS FAMILY) Mizzy compilation CD with Vic's original score for the William Castle-Robert Bloch scare-pic, THE NIGHT WALKER (1964).

PRESERVING THE CLASSICS

From Germany and England come a number of notable new CDs with music for classic silent German horror films, two with original scores and one with a rousing new score by a composer whose work has become synonymous with "Dracula."

The first of these is Music to the German Film, Vol. 1 1900-1945, released on the Ceraton label (B00005QHZH). This compilation of 24 tracks features excerpts from the original "silent" score to METROPOLIS (1926), Hans Erdmann's NOSFERATU (1922), Karl-Ernst Sasse's DER GOLEM, WIE ER IN DIE WELT KAM (1920), George Haentzschel's MUENCHHAUSEN (1943), even the short, whistled, Peer Gynt motif from Fritz Lang's M (1931) and more than a dozen other tracks from German films. Many of these films are the seminal ancestors of today's horror and fantasy films, and their music, based on a lot of the same traditions that early Hollywood music adopted, is most welcome after all these years of being "silent."

One of [IMG4R]the earliest ever horror scores, Giuseppe Becce's score for the famous German expressionist film of 1919, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, finally comes to CD after only 83 years. Becce composed the music to be performed with screenings of the silent film. The original music was lost, but enough fragments remained for composer Emil Gerhardt, commissioned by the Düsseldorf Film Institute, to reconstruct the score, which was composed to a cabaret-style band of eleven layers. "The score's terse characterizations, hectic agitatos, and belcanto-like lyrical passes suit the film perfectly and help memorialize the composer/conductor, known in his time as the Toscanini of the cinema," according to Koch Records, which has issued the score in Germany (Koch Schwan Musica Mundi 3-6751-2). Both of these CDs can be ordered very reasonably through amazon.com's German web site (you can access it at the bottom of www.amazon.com).

From expressionistic Germany to erotic old England comes a new recording of Benjamin Frankel's stirring score for Hammer's CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF. A suite of its music can be found on a new compilation of Frankel's music from CPO (999 809-2). Called Music for the Movies and recorded by Henry Hall and the BBC Dance Orchestra, the disc focuses on THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST and other dramas. It also contains a healthy doze of Frankel's CURSE music, a vibrant and evocatively ferocious horror score (quite a change from the composer's NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or FOOTSTEPS IN THE FOG, which also appear on the disc).

COMPOSERS ON DVD

Disney's lavish 2-DVD set for ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE came out last Tuesday (so did a single DVD set, minus hours of extras included on the deluxe edition's second disc). Among the volumes of background and supporting material included in the extras are a nice nine-minute featurette on the sound effects and music, including an interview with composer James Newton Howard and comments from producer Don Hahn. Howard's score, which upon revisiting via DVD I now regret not having included in my recap of the "Best Soundtracks of '01" (posted on the premium pages of this web site), is a great, surging, heroic-adventure score, and Howard describes his initial approach in the DVD interview: "I've approached it largely as a live-action film, in terms of all the sensibilities. They are exactly the same for me, in terms of initial inspiration, initial ideas, in terms of what the music's going to feel like and what it's going to sound like."

"Composers in Hollywood don't get a lot of chances to write scores like this," says producer Don Hahn. "There's a lot of big, big moments where we've carved out time with no dialogue and with these beautiful scenics and we've said [to James], 'This is a moment that we can't express in words you have to take it.'" Hahn adds that he's always thought Howard should "share story credit on our films, because he transports you musically through several idioms. In other words, he's taken us from Washington D.C. and a very symphonic approach to a culture that's never existed before by inventing a musical voice for Atlantis."

Howard intentionally established a musical difference between the surface world and the Atlantean world, "referencing, to a very distant extent, gamelan, which is the Indonesian orchestral sound, made up of a lot of tunes, chimes and bells and gongs," Howard explains. "It's a wonderfully rich traditional music... The idea is to combine sounds in such a way, juxtapose it against the picture in such a way that the totality of what you'd experience is a unique and wonderful event, much more so than with any individual sound."

"As storytellers, we can only take the audience so far," Hahn sums up. "James can really take you all the way and have that emotional quality resonate with the audience. You really feel that he's tapping into something primal in us, and it helps us appreciate the emotion of the story."

Speaking of [IMG5L]famous German silent films (we were a few page-scrolls up), the haunting NOSFERATU (1922) was restored a few years ago with a new and quite furious score by the late Hammer composer, James Bernard (recorded and released in England by Silva Screen Records in 1997). While other versions are available on CD with various musical elements, the original vampire movie with the best vampire composer has been an exciting prospect for many of us, and frustrating in its many delays in video release. Well, the wait is over - the film, with Bernard's score, has been released in England on VHS and DVD by the British Film Institute (to purchase, point your browser to http://www.bfi.org.uk/bookvid/videos/special/bfiv103.html). Like his famous DRACULA score in 1958, the main theme of which owed much to the three syllables of its antagonist (Drac-u-la), the theme for NOSFERATU happens to consist of a four-note ostinato as well, balanced by a very pretty love theme. Bernard told me in 1998 that he tried hard not to be too "Hammer-esque," when scoring NOSFERATU, "though of course one can't disguise one's own voice."

Soundtrax is our bi-weekly movie soundtrack column.