This edition of Star Tracks is suitably spooky for Halloween with James Horner's score for Deadly Blessing.
Before director Wes Craven introduced the world to Freddy Krueger, a fedora-wearing predator stalking teenage dreams in A Nightmare on Elm Street, he directed low-budget horror movies: Deadly Blessing, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left.
Nick Smith, our resident US-based horror aficionado, ditches modern-day technological trappings with the blessing of the fine folks at Intrada.
Guest post by Nick Smith
The Intrada record label can be relied on for three things: the quality of its recordings, with scrupulous attention paid to cleaning up older soundtracks; its range of curios, from Bernard Hermann noir classics to John Powell’s Solo: A Star Wars Story; and its devotion to James Horner.
Over 20 of the late maestro’s scores, including Cocoon, The Rocketeer and The Land Before Time, have been released.
At 27, Horner poured all his time and resources into composing, conducting and producing movie music. He had a handful of Roger Corman productions under his belt, including Battle Beyond the Stars. Since Corman’s budgets were notoriously small and his only other income was from Teaching Assistant work at UCLA, it was time for Horner to branch out.
Fortunately for his wallet and our ears, he connected with Peter Guber and Jon Peters, who would later bring us Batman; they needed a creepy score for a modest-budget horror flick called Deadly Blessing.
The movie, about demonic goings-on in a rural town of tech-shunning people, called Hittites, starred upcoming actress Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct) and was directed by the scrappy and creative Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Guber and Peters bet their spooky farm on Horner, Stone and Craven, all unknown on the Hollywood circuit – and even the recognizable face of Ernest Borgnine (The Black Hole) was hidden behind a bushy Amish-style beard.
The bet paid off. Craven and Horner took their tiny budget and made a memorable film. "It came off looking pretty good," Craven said a year after release, "as if it cost a lot of money."
The score sounds pretty good too, with a sense of impending doom (as in the second track, ‘Incubus’), contrasting with tootling pastoral flute tunes (‘Martha and Jim’). Tracks like ‘Unwelcome Visitor’ are precedents to Horner’s Aliens, with its clicking percussion and glissandi strings. ‘Trouble in the Convertible’ starts out like a Harry Manfredini Friday the 13th track before veering into Omen territory, with Ancient Latin lyrics and dark chorals.
Horner exceeds the sensationalism with his passion for medieval melodies and jarring, clanging trills that he marries so well in his orchestral music. Imagine a xenomorph bursting out of The Omen and you’ll get the idea behind the score.
Intrada’s version of the Deadly Blessing score has everything a completist could ask for, down to an 11-second ‘Snake Stinger’ which is over quicker than you can hiss. A labour of love produced, edited and mastered by Douglass Fake, this album offers enjoyable early access to Horner’s ‘80s horror scores, showing how essential music is when building up suspense and feelings of fear.
Special thanks to Roger Feigelson at Intrada for providing a copy for review.
Nick Smith's new audiobook, Undead on Arrival, is available from Amazon (affiliate link).
