Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema (review)

This is as about as far-ranging an anthology as one could hope for, and the reader can only admire the sheer quantity of information and analyses contained in one volume. Individual films discussed range from Psycho (1960), Kwaidan (1964) and Hammer vampire films, The Wicker Man (1973), The Exorcist (1973) and The Texan Chainsaw Massacre (1974) through the films of Dario Argento and The Shining (1980) to The Blair Witch Project (1999), Wolf Creek (Australia, 2005), modern vampire cinema, the films of Rob Zombie, and the contemporary Japanese horror cinema (The Ring, Ju-On, etc.). It is a well-chosen cross-section that never tries to be exhaustive, so we can perhaps look forward to a second anthology where it will be possible to include research on Maurice Jarre's extraordinary work for the greatest horror movie ever, Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1959), a task editor Philip Hayward clearly considers essential. Moreover, the notes to many contributions are extensive and send us in new and stimulating directions, essential for complementing the already suggestive and informative essays. Similarly, the bibliographies provide an invaluable source for further reading. Since I have no technical competence in the field of musical composition, I too shall avoid exhaustiveness and draw attention to elements that I have found essential for musicologists and teachers of film alike.

Inasmuch as no scholar can know everything there is to know about movies in general, or film music in particular, it is most useful to have information on cross-cultural references. Thus Howard Shore has recognised (78) the influence on his score for Crash (1996) of the music of the late Toru Takemitsu, whose score for Kwaidan receives detailed analysis. And the chapter devoted to Argento (by Tony Mitchell) points out that 'Morricone's use of a classically oriented palette of often dissonant and jarring avant-garde horror-film music in the Argento trilogy [The Bird with Crystal Plumage, The Cat O'Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet] can be related to the music by British composers such as Richard Rodney Bennett and Elizabeth Luytens in the Hammer horror films of the 1960s...' (88-9). It is perhaps necessary to make clear that neither Bennett nor Luytens wrote scores for the vampire films of that period, although Luytens was responsible for Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964), an Amicus production containing a segment on vampires.

The discussion of the vampire films produced by Hammer, such as Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960) and Kiss of the Vampire (1963), raises interesting questions concerning the use of classical music, as opposed or as complementary to scores composed specially for a given film: a Brahms Lullaby in Brides, Chopin's Nocturne in D flat in Kiss. Thus, if 'the "nocturne" is perhaps emblematic of vampirism', 'the selection of this particular work with its exquisite decorative right-hand figurations may also be considered to reinforce the idea, promoted in the script, that Dr Ravna and his family [of vampires] are highly cultured'. By the time we reach the vampire film of the 1980s discussed in another chapter (The Hunger, The Lost Boys, Near Dark), however, 'classical music' as the signifier of 'high culture' conveys a more negative message: 'one should never trust anyone in a Hollywood film who is a performer of classical music, as this tends to be elided with European identity and then positioned as being fundamentally threatening - morally or physically - to American characters and their values' (172). This, of course, is not limited to music. The intellectual was always suspect in classical Hollywood cinema, as the characters played by Clifton Webb in such films noirs as Laura (1944) and The Dark Corner (1946) testify. In the former, Webb is a writer clearly connoted as gay, in the latter a wealthy art patron who is impotent and has a mother fixation, an alternative way of indicating he is gay. So one Hollywood tendency in the past is overdetermined by another in...