John Ottman's Arachnid Overtures Part One

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Monday, July 08, 2002

John Ottman's career continues to shift between composing (LAKE PLACID, SNOW WHITE, HALLOWEEN: H20), film editing (THE USUAL SUSPECTS), and directing (URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT). Through the space of less than a decade, Ottman has spun his talents into more aspects of filmmaking than most Hollywood hyphenates. At this moment he's up in Vancouver, Canada, editing X-MEN 2, which he will also score. Before leaving Hollywood, he finished scoring the new Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich-produced science fiction mini-spectacular, EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS, directed by Ellory Elkayem (THEY NEST).

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Originally designated ARAC ATTACK, Ottman signed on thinking he would be scoring a war movie set in the Middle East ("IRAQ ATTACK"). He soon discovered the film instead had to do with a gang of poisonous spiders that gets exposed to a noxious chemical that causes them to grow to monumental proportions - which was even more up his alley. "I've always wanted to work with Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, because I've always been envious of the gargantuan science fiction spectacles that they do, so I wanted to do it no matter what it was," Ottman says. The film turned out to be much smaller than previous Devlin/Emmerich efforts like INDEPENDENCE DAY and GODZILLA. "But it was very quirky, so it played into that dark, quirky FANTASY ISLAND/CABLE GUY/GOODBYE LOVER kind of sensibility I've developed," Ottman grins. "It's a very hard movie to score, because it's got to be suspenseful but it's also got to let the audience know not to take it too seriously either. So I tried to give it a personality with the music."

Original cuts of the film during postproduction had been temp-scored first with goofy, cartoon-styled music, then with very dark, suspenseful music throughout, indicating the filmmakers weren't quite sure which edge to take in the film's final musical direction. "There wasn't any music that worked really well in terms of a temp score," Ottman says. "We finally used WITCHES OF EASTWICK, which was hit and miss, but at least it had that quirky quality. But then we dumped all that and I did my own score!"

Temporary scores like that tend to engender a love/hate relationship among film composers. The value is that by using a temp score, a nonmusical director or producer can convey to the composer the type of music or musical feeling he or she is looking for in a given scene; the drawback is that all-too-often filmmakers become so used to hearing the temp music that the composer winds up having to virtually copy whatever was used in the temp score. "Temp scores can be a curse or a blessing at the same time," Ottman says. "The biggest problem about temp scores is that if it's bad and they like it, it takes all your energies to convince them what they have is wrong." In the case of EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS, after a few test screenings, the producers realized Ottman's take on the music was appropriate and left him to work out the score accordingly.



The film's multitude of CGI effects weren't all completed when Ottman began composing his music in fact some effects were so late in coming that Ottman was able to score another movie (TRAPPED) while in a holding pattern on FREAKS. Not being able to visualize the final images wasn't too troubling to Ottman, however. "At the very end I had to tweak the score to accommodate some final effects that I hadn't seen before," says Ottman. "But Dean and his effects team were very clear to me exactly what I should expect: 'Okay, on this shot you've got a thousand spiders crawling all over the place.' If you've got a thousand spiders going all over, you're not going to hit every spider [with a music cue]; it's going to be a general mayhem kind of cue you're going to write. You plug in that general mayhem and, nine times out of ten it tends to work perfectly over what the final visuals were going to be."

Ottman crafted a couple of themes one for the spiders, and one for the people fighting against them which were woven throughout the film's energetic musical mayhem. "I tried to capture the personality of the movie with the Spiders' Theme," says Ottman. "There's another theme for the kids in the movie, but it was applied more generally to the people in the film. There's also a sort of Spider Attack theme."



Ottman's main theme is a wonderfully manic frenzy of rushing movement, pausing here and there for a comment or a quip from chimes or whistles or percussion. It's a truly zany but progressive rhythm piece kind of like Danny Elfman on hyper drive. Ottman uses percussive effects to suggest the scuttling tapping of arachnid limbs, and delicate chimes and shimmering synth keyboard notes to portray wispy tendrils of webbing. The score is a terrific mix of energy and tongue-in-cheek horrific action, anchored by a great theme that embodies both the senses of monsterific danger and appreciable humor.

The score contained about 80 minutes of music. Ottman recorded the score with an 85-piece orchestra with standard instrumentation. "I really enjoyed using the woodwinds in this score more than in many others, simply because of the quirky bass clarinet quality when they go find the spider's lair," says Ottman. "That was fun to do I wish I had four or six bass clarinets like Bernard Herrmann, but I did have three, and that created a nice cluster of sound for those scenes."

Check back soon for part two of our interview with composer John Ottman.

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