THE HISTORY OF HORROR MOVIE MUSIC

What more of an excuse do you need other than it's the fall season to veg in front of the screen and watch monster movies until you turn into a pile of mush that could be mistaken for The Blob? Whether you like slasher flicks, Kaiju, or just plain vintage Universal monster movies, you will usually find an interesting soundtrack to go with it.

From the re-purposed film scores of the classic era to the synth-scapes of the 80s and beyond, horror movie soundtracks have often become as popular as the movie themselves.

Watch the video below to see how the horror music craft has evolved over the past century of movie-making, and click HERE to add some classic horror music to your record collection.



THOM YORKE'S SUSPIRIA SOUNDTRACK

Just in time for Halloween, Italian American director Luca Guadagnino is following one of the most acclaimed films of 2017, Call Me By Your Name, with a remake of the cult ‘70s supernatural thriller Suspiria. Alongside a strong cast led by Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton, one of the most eye-catching details about the film is that the score is by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.

Suspiria is Yorke’s first full-length score, but it is of course by no means the first time he and his bandmates have lent their talents to film. More than two decades ago, Yorke wrote the haunting “Exit Music” for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. A few years later, multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood began a parallel and increasingly prominent career as a soundtrack composer, starting with his score to Simon Pummell’s Bodysong and blossoming through repeated collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson on films including There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, and Phantom Thread.

Yorke has described the process of creating the music for Suspiria as “a form of making spells,” and fittingly, where Greenwood’s soundtrack work often tends toward formal orchestration, Yorke’s is a more esoteric affair. Alongside the things you might expect—creepy one-note piano, piercing strings—are flourishes of Wicker Man–like folk (the gorgeous “Suspirium”), choral incantations (“The Conjuring of Anke”), and time-stretched atmospherics that recall Angelo Badalamenti’s work for David Lynch (“The Inevitable Pull”). Fittingly, given that the film is set in divided Berlin in the late ‘70s, there are also moments of trippy, kosmische groove that hint at Can or Cluster (“Has Ended”).

There are inevitably suggestions, too, of the soundtrack to the original Suspiria, itself one of several collaborations between director Dario Argento and Italian prog group Goblin. At a panel discussion following the new film’s world premiere in Venice in September, Yorke admitted that it took him several months to agree to score the new film, such was his apprehension at trying to follow Goblin, whose Suspiria is acknowledged to be one of the greatest horror soundtracks of all time.

In the end, he decided the best approach would be to not reference the original soundtrack at all, except in its use of “repetition of motifs, again and again and again. Part of your mind was saying, ‘Please, I don’t want to hear this anymore.’”

Listen to an example of Yorke's score below.




Click HERE for more horror movie soundtracks by rockers.

[SOURCE: Reverb.com.]