Scored to Death 1 and 2

Scorey Movies

Scored To Death
Conversations With Some Of
Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247142

Scored To Death 2
More Conversations With Some
Of Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247234

Just a quick shout out of two books my friend Dr. Rob gifted me for both Christmas and my birthday recently. Anyone who has been reading any of my reviews with any regularity over the years has probably picked up on the fact by now that I love movie scores. I listen to them all the time and, funnily enough, the guy who gave me these two tomes is the only person I know in real life, who has the same kind of passion and dedication to them as I do although, curiously, he doesn’t listen to a lot of horror scores, it has to be said. Which is the subject of these two tremendous tomes by J. Blake Fichera...

Basically, what Fichera’s done here (and also apparently on some podcasts of the same title, which I really need to catch up with some day when time is not my enemy) is to take some key film score composers who are still with us (or were when he started out on each of these two projects) and interview them with a special emphasis, for the most part, on their contributions to the horror genre.

The first volume collects interviews with Nathan Barr, Charles Bernstein, Joseph Bishara, Simon Boswell, John Carpenter, Jay Chattaway, Fabio Frizzi, Jeff Grace, Mairizio Guarini, Tom Hajdu (of Tomandandy), Alan Howarth, Harry Manfredini, Claudio Simonetti and Christopher Young. The second volume comprises interviews with Michael Abels, Richard Band, Holly Amber Church, Charles Clouser, Robert Cobert, Disasterpeace, Koji Endo, Brad Fiedel, John Harrison, Kenji Kawai, Joseph LoDuca, John Massari, Bear McCreary, Rob, Donald Rubenstein and Craig Safan. Of those two lists, I have at least one score from the majority of them listed (some of them, many shiny discs... I’ve even been to concerts by some of the guys) so there’s a lot of familiarity with their work and styles for the most part but, even when the interview was with a composer I hadn’t experienced myself, I found the answers they gave to Fichera’s questions very interesting and I especially liked the back story provided by many of the composers about how they came to find their calling of writing music and how the film scoring side started for them.

Even certain questions which were duplicated, more or less, through various chapters, were interesting because you get to get a feel for how each different composer (of very different ages in some cases) correlate with their answers or, indeed, contradict each other as their processes differ. Some of them, for example, find the script a helpful start but many of them would rather not read the script and compose from what the director actually managed to get worked up into the rough cut. Although many composers, as I expected, hated the more common practice these days of providing a temp track with the cut (where a film would be cut to found music from other sources which, because of using these tracks to support the rough cut, brings the danger of the director loving the temp score... perhaps the most famous example of this would be Stanley Kubrick rejecting Alex North’s score for 2001 - A Space Odyssey and licencing the music on the temp instead), there are actually a couple of people in these books who welcome the inclusion of the temp track as an aid to a communication of the emotional feel of the pieces they need to compose. Of course, the worst thing I hear sometimes when I listen to a score is actually hearing the temp track kinda bleeding through into the composer's own music, because you can recognise the structure of the cue and realise straight away what track from another film was probably there in its place when the rough cut was assembled. You can often tell when a composer has been asked to imitate something fairly well known.

And of course, the composers won’t always jell with various readers. A couple of composers came across as a little naive to me, for example and another one or two came over, it seemed to me at least, at just the wrong side of pretentious. I suspect that all comes down to the baggage and life experiences a reader brings with them as much as anything actually on the printed pages here though and it really is to be expected. Sometimes they get it a little wrong too. Without naming names, for example, one composer quoted a very famous film composer saying that they weren’t, because of their period, as experimental as he and always did things with a big orchestra when in fact, the composer he was referencing was as much known for his smaller, unusual groupings of instruments and spirit of experimentation as the composer pointing the finger here (probably more so).

It’s not a surprise that my favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, comes up a lot on almost everyone’s favourites or most influential, although I wish people wouldn’t keep thinking that movies like Psycho are horror films (nor William’s Jaws, nor Shore’s Silence Of The Lambs for that matter)... it’s like one day, everybody in movie appreciation land just woke up and forgot the genre of thriller ever existed.

Overall though, these two tomes are both entertaining and illuminating and it’s great hearing about experimental instruments, the odd score I’ve not heard and the odd film I’ve not seen (I watched the phenomenal Under The Silver Lake, reviewed here and grabbed Disasterpeace’s score for said film on CD as soon as I found out about them from this book... um... yeah, actually this book is another one of those which is turning out to have an expensive afterlife affair with my wallet). It’s good that the almighty Ligeti was referenced as one of those composers who, inadvertently because it certainly wasn’t his intent, invented and influenced the vocabulary of horror film scoring and is still regarded highly by many composers today (who also list Penderecki, obviously, as an influence on the genre). I was also delighted and bemused to find that composer Kenji Kawai, who wrote the scores for the original Ringu and some of its sequels and spin offs, lists Burt Bacharach as one of his primary influences.

Probably the worst part of the second volume, for me, was when one of my absolute favourite contemporary score composers, I won’t name him here, talked about a certain common practice as to how modern film and TV composers write scores these days and his approach seemed to me to be very disheartening and disappointing. In fact, I could almost picture Herrmann and Morricone spinning in their graves about what he said here. That was a real eye opener.

All in all, though, if you are someone who has an active interest in either horror films, film scores or that wonderful place where both those things come together to make art, then Scored To Death Volumes 1 and 2 by J. Blake Fichera are definitely worth your time and money. And, of course, if you have the scores, then you can play one or two of them after reading each chapter, which is a nice thing to do of an evening, for sure. Definitely pick these two up.

Splintered Visions

Fulci In Motion

Splintered Visions -
Lucio Fulci and His Films
by Troy Howarth
Midnight Marquee Press
ISBN: 978-1936168613

Lucio Fulci is one of those directors who I’m never sure whether I’m on board with. I loved his films like Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (reviewed briefly here), Seven Notes In Black (aka The Psychic), Don’t Torture A Duckling, The New York Ripper (reviewed here), City of the Living Dead (reviewed here) and The Beyond (reviewed here) whereas others such as Four Of The Apocalypse and The House By The Cemetery (reviewed here) leave me completely cold. And then others such as Manhattan Baby (reviewed here) and his much celebrated Zombi (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters aka Zombie 2, reviewed here) are quite fun but with some clear problems which I’m only just about able to overlook. So whenever anyone asks me how I feel about Lucio Fulci as a director... I’m never too sure how to reply.

So I decided to read a book about him and see what I was missing.

Troy Howarth’s Splintered Visions - Lucio Fulci And His Films is actually a pretty good tome if you want to know a little bit more about the subject although, I would add the caveat that, as excellent as the book is (and it really is), it tends to focus on the ‘and his films’ part of the title more than it does the man himself. Although, in terms of his collaborators... well I feel I know a little more about them.

The book starts off with an intro by Brett Halsey which, in terms of the typographic design of the book goes, seems to inexplicably blend into the author’s own preface and makes a nonsense of the words until you realise that a software design accident must have happened and gone unnoticed before going to print. After this though, we get a fantastic study of the films that Fulci worked on in one capacity or another, highlighting his work when he started out and not only as a director but as a writing contributor too. So the early sections about his career in his celluloid endeavours was really interesting to me because I knew nothing about it.

As the volume progresses, the same format is utilised all the way through but Howarth, who really does know how to write about this stuff in the way that a lot of academics aren’t able to master, throws in loads of peripheral information about the various actors, actresses, writers, special effects guys and composers of note who worked on various films with Fulci. And it all seems very thorough and very interesting. Not as thorough as Tim Lucas’ book on Mario Bava, of course but, certainly I learned a lot I didn’t know while reading through here. For example, I found out a little about composer Piero Piccioni being accused and linked with a murder charge on an infamous, unsolved case involving the death of a woman on a beach and I also found out that famous singer Mina was, apparently, publically shunned for her pregnancy by a married actor she was having an affair with. Stuff like this hardly ever comes up on album liner notes so it was interesting to be reading this kind of information here.

Another thing Howarth does, aside from reveal little gems about the conditions Fulci had to put up with on set... such as panning around a shot with the furniture being immediately removed by repo men as said items left the camera’s field of vision because the producer owed so much money, is the regular insertion of interviews with various key people and collaborators from Fulci’s long career. Some of these are lifelong friends and others are people who only worked with him once but many of the insights are, if not always invaluable, at least entertaining. And it's especially nice to hear from one of his more frequent musical collaborators, composer Fabio Frizzi, about his working relationship with him.

It’s interesting in that Fulci’s notoriety at treating his actors and actresses like cattle (and worse) is acknowledged by almost everyone who is interviewed for this book but, as far as I can see, only one person in the book has said he was actually like that to them. One wonders if the legend of his behaviour is more of a storm in a tea cup or, perhaps more likely, the majority of people who could have been interviewed had no interest in talking to people involved with a book extolling Fulci’s virtues.

The reason this is only a fairly short review is because the only complaint I really have about this book is that, although I felt I knew a fair few of Fulci’s films better... which I’m grateful to the author for because I now know which ones to seek out and which ones to ignore... I didn’t feel I knew Fulci ‘the man’ in any way better than I had before going in and, since I knew practically nothing about him before I started reading, I guess in terms of the personality behind the films, I felt a little short changed in that respect.

That being said, the writer had me on his side straight away by rejecting the claim, early on in the book, that the non-Fulci film Perfume Of The Lady In Black (reviewed here) is, in any way, a giallo film. Sure, it uses the cinematic language of the gialli being made at the time but, if it was going to have to be pigeon-holed into a particular genre of Italian exploitation cinema... giallo is not the one I would label put it in (and to label it would give away the ending of the movie to anyone who’s not seen it so I’m not commenting further on that here). Howarth is a writer I now trust to write competently and informatively about various aspects of cinema and I shall be seeking out further books from this gentleman in future, I think. If you are a relative Fulci novice, like me, then you will find a lot of information in this book and it’s written in an accessible and entertaining way. If you are more of an expert, well I think the ‘devil’s honey’ is in the detail and I believe you will still find this one informative for all the many nuggets of information about various other figures involved with Italian cinema at the time. Whichever camp you are in, Splintered Visions - Lucio Fulci And His Films is a strong recommendation from me as I think this is an indispensable book for people interested in this man’s work... if not necessarily the man himself.