A few years ago, my wife and I had an unexpected experience with a classic silent film, one we both loved and looked forward to seeing on the big screen. The movie was Nosferatu from 1922, playing tonight on TCM, and what was unexpected was just how much we didn’t enjoy it. At all. We saw it at the AFI and the problems came from multiple sides. One was the audience. It wasn’t the audience that we were used to. As regular patrons of the theater, we had come to appreciate just how many fellow classic and foreign movie lovers there were who showed up for matinees of the not so well known titles, like we did. Those audiences were attentive and enthusiastic about the movie on the screen. At Nosferatu, whose showing is a well-known and extremely popular local event, the audience was unrecognizable to us. Younger by decades and clearly there because they heard about the cool experience where this “creaky old movie” gets a much needed updating with a modern score. They laughed and snickered at the movie and one got the feeling that most everyone in there had a smug sense of superiority over the work. Then there was the emcee who, dressed as Dracula, introduced the movie by running through some anecdotes he snatched from Wikipedia. But mainly, the problem was the music. I can’t remember which ultra-hip “orchestra” did the music but I can tell you this: They weren’t concerned with the movie at all. Their one concern was making sure their music was clever and memorable and if it didn’t match the action on the screen, well, who cares?
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The problem I had with this, aside from the obvious as described above, was how much it killed the mood of the movie. For instance, if you’ve seen Nosferatu, or even if you haven’t, you probably know the signature visual of Count Orlok’s shadow ascending the stairs. In the theater, the orchestra decided this scene should be accompanied by percussion so bombastic that the climax of the 1812 Overture came off as a gentle nocturne by comparison. Any sense of the eerie was completely lost. Any sense of the ominous, gone. The score was awful.
It received rapturous applause.
My wife and I clapped politely for a few seconds and left. I mean, they deserved applause as the talented musicians they were and for the performance they gave. And that’s what they got the applause for. As for serving the movie, they failed completely.
Now I’m not one to necessarily buy into that old saw that if you notice the work (editing, acting, music, etc) it’s not doing its job. I notice great editing, acting, and music all the time while watching movies and it is absolutely doing its job. I guarantee from the first moment I saw it, I noticed Psycho’s score and, believe me, it was doing its job despite me noticing it. I can’t tell you how many times I have said, while watching a movie, “This performance is great!” But I still know what it means, it’s just not phrased properly. What it’s saying is that if one aspect is ALL you notice, it’s not doing its job (or everything else is so awful that the one thing stands out). And believe me, the score in the live performance of Nosferatu was ALL you noticed. Everything should work together, and in this case, the score felt like it was completely ignoring the movie.
Another case of this happening, though not in live performance this time, was the new score that Philip Glass composed a few years back for the 1931 Dracula (something about that story makes people go crazy with the modern scores, huh?). The music itself was fine. It was beautifully orchestrated and composed. It’s just that it didn’t fit the movie at all. It didn’t even seem to fit it shot by shot. It really did feel as if Glass simply had a piece he had already composed and decided to use it for the movie.
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All movie music is a delicate balance with subject matter and horror is no exception. With horror, the composer will hopefully work with the imagery on the screen, and plot action, to increase the tension and create atmosphere. In the days of classic horror, like those made famous by Universal, this often meant a full orchestral score for the opening theme and little else afterwards. It was felt the mood worked best without too much music. Later, full scores were employed throughout and some of the best of these were composed by James Bernard for Hammer Studio. Much of his work is still available and works well both on its own and in conjunction with the movie. Around the same time that Bernard was doing his great work for Hammer, Bernard Hermann decided to use all strings – no percussion, no brass, no woodwinds – in his score for Psycho. Eerie and strident string motifs became a favorite for years to come with horror. One of my favorite horror scores ever remains the brilliant work for Blood on Satan’s Claw, composed by Marc Wilkinson, and making full use of the eeriest damn strings you ever did hear.
Following the sixties, the scoring for horror films opened up. The Exorcist gave us a theme that used an electric piano motif in conjunction with jarring strings. The Wicker Man used folk music sung by the characters in the film. The Omen gave us a theme that set off years and years of Latin chants in horror cinema to signal danger and dread. And so on. The world of cinema in general, and horror in particular, became opened up to new ways of blending music and image. And whether that music is a full orchestra or a synthesizer doesn’t matter. What matters is, it needs to fit the movie. The score I heard on that fateful day at a showing of Nosferatu did not and it’s a shame. When music and image work together, they can produce something powerful and memorable for years to come. When they don’t, the movies are the worse off for it.