WHAT LIES BENEATH on Compact Disc

A dynamic and powerful work in the vein of Bernard Herrmann.

By Randall Larson     August 25, 2000

In what may well be this year's SIXTH SENSE, Alan Silvestri has donned a cape of Bernard Herrmann and composed a dynamic and powerful work for Robert Zemeckis' scary ghost story, WHAT LIES BENEATH. The music is as eerily beautiful as it is potently chillingscarifying when it needs to be, but more often sustaining a carefully calculated textural tonality of creepiness. Avoiding use of a repetitive theme, Silvestri contrasts brief lyrical phrases with dark, lumbering, and undulating passages, building a brilliant composition that is alternately eloquent, and haunting.

Silvestri's notation and orchestrations are especially reminiscentand intentionally so, according to Silvestriof the music of Bernard Herrmann. Silvestri adopts the same kind of chord patterns and dynamic musical progressions that Herrmann mastered in such scores as VERTIGO, PSYCHO, and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Elements of each score are present in WHAT LIES BENEATHespecially in the cues 'Forbidden Fruit,' 'The Getaway,' and 'End Title.'

Silvestri frequently employs musical stingersbrief electrifying jolts of musical phrasingin order to create an audience-pleasing shock, but these are never musical cop-outs or red herrings. Silvestri makes them a logical progression in his overall ambience, and they are developed naturally from the rhythm of the score. The music's main thrust is one of quiet, sustained ominousness. While there are moments of musical flurry and dramatic dissonance (as in 'The Getaway,' the CD's showpiece cue), Silvestri's main focus is in achieving a slowly growing mood of terror and apprehension.

The score neatly merges synthesizers and symphonics to create an often ethereal sonic texture that drifts icily into the cortex of one's spine, tingling with moods of unrelenting dread. There are moments of ghastly shock and panic, onrushing music that chills one immediately; rolling timpani rumblings create avalanches on top of shrill synthesizer tones and spare violin patterns, emphasized by low growlings of brass and rhythmic pulses of low winds. But all of this is calculated and carefully developed from a simple base of chord progression and repetitive tonality that sustain the core of the music.

As a result, despite the occasional cacophony and bits of eerie textural sampling, the music is quite listenable on CD apart from its visual correlation. Only the CD's shortness (less than half an hour of music) seems to be a potential drawback, but even so the music plays works well in its brevity. Too much of this could well be counterproductive to its effectiveness on CD.

Throughout the score, Silvestri sustains a marvelous mood of suspense, subtly suggesting the apparition that exists behind the every-day world of the protagonists. Like whispered tendrils of ectoplasmic malevolence, the composer's frightening music possesses a chilling power. Listen to it on headphones in the dark and dare yourself not to glance continuously behind you.