Thursday, October 6, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #430: Horror movie scores

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're into October, which means that Halloween comes up at the end of the month. Unsurprisingly, that also means that the month's editions of the blogathon are all horror-related. For the first Thursday in October, the theme is Horror: movie scores, which I'm taking to mean horror movies that are well-known for their scores. In the end, I wound up picking two more recent (at least by my standards) movies, and an older horror-adjacent movie that got a musical update:

The Exorcist (1973). Known musically for the use of the progressive rock song "Tubular Bells", or at least part of the song, what I didn't know until I looked it up is what went into scoring the rest of the movie. Apparently director William Friedkin had hired Lalo Schifrin to write a score but rejected that score. Bernard Herrmann turned Friedkin down before Friedkin decided to use several 20th century classical pieces as well as some music by Jack Nitzsche.

Jaws (1975). John Williams' music is iconic here; just do the opening notes of the music accompanying the shark and everyone will know what it is.

Metropolis (1927/1984). Fritz Lang's classic silent film about a future with a wealthy society living above ground supported by workers forced to work and live underground is generally considered science-fiction, but because of the dystopic nature of the film it's somewhat horror-adjacent. As for the soundtrack, here I'm referring to the 1984 version of the film which was re-edited by music producer Giorgio Moroder, who also provided a new soundtrack including songs by popular recording artists of the day.

3 comments:

Brittani Burnham said...

I've seen all three of your picks this week! That rarely happens. Great choices!

Birgit said...

I do love your first 2 choices and love Metropolis but hated the rock songs used for this film. Hated it! Lol

ThePunkTheory said...

All of these are perfect and downright iconic picks!