Music in the Horror Film
Content
Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (review)
Charles Leinberger
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2011,
pp. 101-105 (Article)
Published by Liverpool University Press
DOI: 10.1353/msm.2011.0004
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/msm/summary/v005/5.1.leinberger.html
Access Provided by Bristol University at 12/06/12 11:51AM GMT
MSMI
5:1 Spring 11
101
Neil Lerner (ed.)
Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear
New York: Routledge, 2010, 240pp.
review by Charles Leinberger
The frequency with which books on film music are being published has
been increasing dramatically in the last decade. Not only do readers have
a wide selection of new books from which to choose, but the parameters
of this interdisciplinary field are gradually becoming more clearly
defined. Some recent texts are comprehensive chronologies of film music
during the sound era, such as James Wierzbicki’s insightful Film Music: A
History. Others take a less chronological and more methodological
approach, such as James Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer’s
versatile Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. Still others,
such as Scarecrow Press’s diverse series of Film Score Guides, are each a
monograph that deals with one particular composer and one particular
film. Routledge’s new Music and Screen Media Series is original in that each
volume of the series is designed as a collection of essays on a particular
genre of visual media, including both film and television. According to
the ‘Series Foreword’ by Neil Lerner, this series ‘offers collections of
original essays written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and
scholars of music, film and media studies in general, and interdisciplinary humanists who give strong attention to music’ (vii). Music in the
Horror Film: Listening to Fear, the first entry in the series, accomplishes this
goal by offering a range of approaches that will appeal to a diverse
audience. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of music and media
studies will find this to be an enjoyable read; and teachers of music
theory, music literature and media studies will find this volume to be
worth their time and suitable for adoption in a course on film musicology.
According to Routledge’s website, an upcoming volume in this series,
edited by James Deaville (a contributor to the present anthology), will
focus on music for television, and yet another, edited by Kathryn
Kalinak, will be dedicated to music in the western.
For readers who are familiar with film musicology, but who might be
somewhat unfamiliar with this particular genre, this volume serves as a
well-conceived introduction that only occasionally leaves the reader overwhelmed with specific jargon. Each author offers a unique perspective on
102
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
5:1 Spring 11
♦
MSMI
review by Charles Leinberger
the genre, some more musicological than others, but the order of essays
and the transition from one essay to the next is always coherent.
Many of the essays in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear deal
more with how pre-existing music is used in horror film, as opposed to
how a composer composes new music for a film. As a result, there is less
emphasis of the compositional process. It would have been useful if
Lerner had articulated whether this was by design, as I found it to be a
noticeable, if not distracting, trend throughout the volume.
Although not well acquainted with all the films discussed, I had little
trouble following the authors’ discourse on these unfamiliar films. If the
reader is a musician, he or she will most likely find the essays by
Halfyard, Code and Whitesell to be very enjoyable to read without
encountering very many unfamiliar terms. Film scholars who do not
have a strong musical background might likewise enjoy the contributions
by Link, Tompkins and Buhler.
As described in the volume’s ‘Preface’,
the first three chapters take a more thematic approach (e.g. the presence of
organs, tritones, and children’s music) while the remaining nine delve into
a particular film or group of films with an eye – and ear! – towards finding
new understandings of these filmic texts through a careful reflection upon
the music.
(x)
This organisation seems to work well. Not being an expert on horror
film, I found that after the first three essays – those by Brown, Halfyard
and Link – I was well prepared for a detailed discussion of specific films
and some key subgenres, such as slasher films and vampire films.
Julie Brown’s ‘Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror’ was a
pleasant read, although lacking musical examples. The illustrations,
nevertheless, were plentiful. The numerous still photographs from
Carnival of Souls were well chosen and most useful, but I was a little disappointed in that the essay dealt more with the organ as an instrument and
its visual images in horror film, rather than organ music as composed for
horror film. In other words, it seemed as if Brown was advancing a
theory that the organ was a visual signifier as much as an auditory one.
The second essay, Janet Halfyard’s ‘Mischief Afoot: Supernatural
Horror-comedies and the Diabolus in Musica’, was an excellent balance of
film scholarship and musicology, as is her earlier work on Danny
Elfman’s music for Batman. Her historical information on the use of the
tritone, or lack thereof, in medieval music is credible, as is her ability to
relate the tritone as a signifier of things unholy to modern film music. In
the third essay, Stan Link’s ‘The Monster and the Music Box: Children
MSMI
5:1 Spring 11
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
103
♦
review by Charles Leinberger
and the Soundtrack of Horror’, the pendulum swings back the other way.
Like Brown’s essay, there are no musical examples. The essay is less
concerned with compositional techniques, and more with the role that
music plays in creating that part of the film’s soundtrack that gives a
particular film its desired child-like quality. His discourse on the
innocence and horror dichotomy is most informative.
As mentioned earlier, the following nine essays each deal with a specific
film – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example – or group of films, such as
various Dracula films and others in the vampire subgenre. The first of
these nine essays is by the volume’s editor, Lerner. His ‘The Strange Case
of Rouben Mamoulian’s Sound Stew: The Uncanny Soundtrack in Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)’ brings the reader back to a discussion on more
intramusical elements. The amount of detail included in the events
surrounding the creation of the ‘sound stew’ is impressive.
Ross J. Fenimore’s ‘Voices that Lie Within: The Heard and Unheard
in Psycho’ is a thought-provoking examination of the assumptions that the
viewer makes concerning the unseen source of voices heard in the film
theatre, and how, if at all, those voices are heard by characters in the
fictional world created by the film’s narrative. The musical examples are
a welcome addition, but there is little discussion that relates directly to
those examples.
Claire Sisco King’s ‘Ramblin’ Men and Piano Men: Crises of Music and
Masculinity in The Exorcist’ begins as a musicological essay, describing the
events leading up to the creation of the score as it is heard in the film,
with informative details surrounding the composition and eventual
rejection of the Lalo Schifrin score. This essay discusses quite clearly how
music is used in this film, as opposed to how music was composed for this
film, and then turns to matters of masculinity and sexuality, which,
although relevant to the film on several levels, might be read as being less
relevant to the music heard in the film.
David J. Code’s ‘Rehearing The Shining: Musical Undercurrents in the
Overlook Hotel’, like the preceding King essay, is a discussion of how
pre-composed music is used in a film. This essay includes very impressive
reproductions of music of Penderecki, including excerpts from The
Awakening of Jacob (1975) and Polymorphia (1963) that are both used in The
Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Code’s attention to musicological detail
is impressive; his vocabulary in describing the relationships between
sound and image is formidable.
K.J. Donnelly’s ‘Hearing Deep Seated Fears: John Carpenter’s The Fog
(1980)’ is unlike any other publication I have read on film music.
Avoiding the normal approach of discussing how a composer’s process
interacts with the visual image, Donnelly spends much time discussing
104
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
5:1 Spring 11
♦
MSMI
review by Charles Leinberger
sound, and is quite expert at describing technical and acoustic issues
related to the listener’s perception of the film soundtrack. His essay is
enjoyable and informative, especially the discussion concerning the
historical significance of early analogue synthesizers.
What bothered me most about James Deaville’s ‘The Beauty of
Horror: Kilar, Coppola, and Dracula’ was his repeated practice of
quoting a source and then pointing out how that source failed to make
another observation (quoting Brown on p. 188, Maltalbano on p. 190,
Worland on p. 190 and Elsaesser on p. 197). Often, these observations
that Deaville claims have been overlooked by others actually contribute
little to his argument. Yet when it comes to the musical examples in his
essay, he is the one who presents a predicament for the reader. Why is
the bottom staff of Figure 11.1, labelled ‘Piano’, notated in the
perplexing French violin clef (G clef on the first line) and not in treble
clef (G clef on the second line)? This is probably a mistake in the transcription of the example, not subsequently caught by the proofreader.
This oversight detracts from his argument, which is unfortunate, especially considering his rather pretentious criticism of the arguments made
by others. Otherwise, Deaville’s essay is very insightful.
Lloyd Whitesell’s ‘Quieting the Ghosts in The Sixth Sense and The Others’
was a pleasure to read, with useful musical examples neatly dovetailed
into the text. As in the essay by Halfyard, some of the musical examples
appear to be reproduced in slightly different sizes from others, which to
my eye, makes some stand out as possible formatting errors. Although I
have not seen the two films he discusses, he leads the reader from one
point to the next in a way that is extremely easy to follow.
I have chosen to discuss the subsequent two essays together, as I
believe they address a reader much more as film scholar than musicologist. Joe Tompkins’s ‘Pop Goes the Horror Score: Left Alone in The Last
House on the Left’, like the essays by Brown and Link, contains no musical
exemplification, and, although very well written, dedicates the least
amount of space to the discussion of music of all the essays in the
anthology. Although I was surprised that James Buhler’s ‘Music and the
Adult Ideal in A Nightmare on Elm Street’ did not mention music in any
detail until four-and-a-half pages into the essay, I enjoyed his depiction
of the slasher subgenre and, in particular, the concepts of the ‘final girl’
and the ‘adult ideal’. His analysis of the slasher subgenre and of the
position of Nightmare on Elm Street in that particular subgenre is informative and extremely well thought-out.
In general, this attractive volume is a well-balanced blend of film scholarship and musicology, and represents a welcome step forward in the
synthesis of the two comparable disciplines. If subsequent volumes in this
MSMI
5:1 Spring 11
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
105
♦
review by Charles Leinberger
new series from Routledge are as practical, insightful and informative as
Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, then this series should draw the
interest of readers from both areas. This volume could easily be adopted
for an undergraduate course on horror film for students majoring in film
studies or music, or possibly a graduate class that includes a horror film
component, along with other genres.
Charles Leinberger
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2011,
pp. 101-105 (Article)
Published by Liverpool University Press
DOI: 10.1353/msm.2011.0004
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/msm/summary/v005/5.1.leinberger.html
Access Provided by Bristol University at 12/06/12 11:51AM GMT
MSMI
5:1 Spring 11
101
Neil Lerner (ed.)
Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear
New York: Routledge, 2010, 240pp.
review by Charles Leinberger
The frequency with which books on film music are being published has
been increasing dramatically in the last decade. Not only do readers have
a wide selection of new books from which to choose, but the parameters
of this interdisciplinary field are gradually becoming more clearly
defined. Some recent texts are comprehensive chronologies of film music
during the sound era, such as James Wierzbicki’s insightful Film Music: A
History. Others take a less chronological and more methodological
approach, such as James Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer’s
versatile Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. Still others,
such as Scarecrow Press’s diverse series of Film Score Guides, are each a
monograph that deals with one particular composer and one particular
film. Routledge’s new Music and Screen Media Series is original in that each
volume of the series is designed as a collection of essays on a particular
genre of visual media, including both film and television. According to
the ‘Series Foreword’ by Neil Lerner, this series ‘offers collections of
original essays written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and
scholars of music, film and media studies in general, and interdisciplinary humanists who give strong attention to music’ (vii). Music in the
Horror Film: Listening to Fear, the first entry in the series, accomplishes this
goal by offering a range of approaches that will appeal to a diverse
audience. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of music and media
studies will find this to be an enjoyable read; and teachers of music
theory, music literature and media studies will find this volume to be
worth their time and suitable for adoption in a course on film musicology.
According to Routledge’s website, an upcoming volume in this series,
edited by James Deaville (a contributor to the present anthology), will
focus on music for television, and yet another, edited by Kathryn
Kalinak, will be dedicated to music in the western.
For readers who are familiar with film musicology, but who might be
somewhat unfamiliar with this particular genre, this volume serves as a
well-conceived introduction that only occasionally leaves the reader overwhelmed with specific jargon. Each author offers a unique perspective on
102
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
5:1 Spring 11
♦
MSMI
review by Charles Leinberger
the genre, some more musicological than others, but the order of essays
and the transition from one essay to the next is always coherent.
Many of the essays in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear deal
more with how pre-existing music is used in horror film, as opposed to
how a composer composes new music for a film. As a result, there is less
emphasis of the compositional process. It would have been useful if
Lerner had articulated whether this was by design, as I found it to be a
noticeable, if not distracting, trend throughout the volume.
Although not well acquainted with all the films discussed, I had little
trouble following the authors’ discourse on these unfamiliar films. If the
reader is a musician, he or she will most likely find the essays by
Halfyard, Code and Whitesell to be very enjoyable to read without
encountering very many unfamiliar terms. Film scholars who do not
have a strong musical background might likewise enjoy the contributions
by Link, Tompkins and Buhler.
As described in the volume’s ‘Preface’,
the first three chapters take a more thematic approach (e.g. the presence of
organs, tritones, and children’s music) while the remaining nine delve into
a particular film or group of films with an eye – and ear! – towards finding
new understandings of these filmic texts through a careful reflection upon
the music.
(x)
This organisation seems to work well. Not being an expert on horror
film, I found that after the first three essays – those by Brown, Halfyard
and Link – I was well prepared for a detailed discussion of specific films
and some key subgenres, such as slasher films and vampire films.
Julie Brown’s ‘Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror’ was a
pleasant read, although lacking musical examples. The illustrations,
nevertheless, were plentiful. The numerous still photographs from
Carnival of Souls were well chosen and most useful, but I was a little disappointed in that the essay dealt more with the organ as an instrument and
its visual images in horror film, rather than organ music as composed for
horror film. In other words, it seemed as if Brown was advancing a
theory that the organ was a visual signifier as much as an auditory one.
The second essay, Janet Halfyard’s ‘Mischief Afoot: Supernatural
Horror-comedies and the Diabolus in Musica’, was an excellent balance of
film scholarship and musicology, as is her earlier work on Danny
Elfman’s music for Batman. Her historical information on the use of the
tritone, or lack thereof, in medieval music is credible, as is her ability to
relate the tritone as a signifier of things unholy to modern film music. In
the third essay, Stan Link’s ‘The Monster and the Music Box: Children
MSMI
5:1 Spring 11
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
103
♦
review by Charles Leinberger
and the Soundtrack of Horror’, the pendulum swings back the other way.
Like Brown’s essay, there are no musical examples. The essay is less
concerned with compositional techniques, and more with the role that
music plays in creating that part of the film’s soundtrack that gives a
particular film its desired child-like quality. His discourse on the
innocence and horror dichotomy is most informative.
As mentioned earlier, the following nine essays each deal with a specific
film – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example – or group of films, such as
various Dracula films and others in the vampire subgenre. The first of
these nine essays is by the volume’s editor, Lerner. His ‘The Strange Case
of Rouben Mamoulian’s Sound Stew: The Uncanny Soundtrack in Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)’ brings the reader back to a discussion on more
intramusical elements. The amount of detail included in the events
surrounding the creation of the ‘sound stew’ is impressive.
Ross J. Fenimore’s ‘Voices that Lie Within: The Heard and Unheard
in Psycho’ is a thought-provoking examination of the assumptions that the
viewer makes concerning the unseen source of voices heard in the film
theatre, and how, if at all, those voices are heard by characters in the
fictional world created by the film’s narrative. The musical examples are
a welcome addition, but there is little discussion that relates directly to
those examples.
Claire Sisco King’s ‘Ramblin’ Men and Piano Men: Crises of Music and
Masculinity in The Exorcist’ begins as a musicological essay, describing the
events leading up to the creation of the score as it is heard in the film,
with informative details surrounding the composition and eventual
rejection of the Lalo Schifrin score. This essay discusses quite clearly how
music is used in this film, as opposed to how music was composed for this
film, and then turns to matters of masculinity and sexuality, which,
although relevant to the film on several levels, might be read as being less
relevant to the music heard in the film.
David J. Code’s ‘Rehearing The Shining: Musical Undercurrents in the
Overlook Hotel’, like the preceding King essay, is a discussion of how
pre-composed music is used in a film. This essay includes very impressive
reproductions of music of Penderecki, including excerpts from The
Awakening of Jacob (1975) and Polymorphia (1963) that are both used in The
Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Code’s attention to musicological detail
is impressive; his vocabulary in describing the relationships between
sound and image is formidable.
K.J. Donnelly’s ‘Hearing Deep Seated Fears: John Carpenter’s The Fog
(1980)’ is unlike any other publication I have read on film music.
Avoiding the normal approach of discussing how a composer’s process
interacts with the visual image, Donnelly spends much time discussing
104
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
5:1 Spring 11
♦
MSMI
review by Charles Leinberger
sound, and is quite expert at describing technical and acoustic issues
related to the listener’s perception of the film soundtrack. His essay is
enjoyable and informative, especially the discussion concerning the
historical significance of early analogue synthesizers.
What bothered me most about James Deaville’s ‘The Beauty of
Horror: Kilar, Coppola, and Dracula’ was his repeated practice of
quoting a source and then pointing out how that source failed to make
another observation (quoting Brown on p. 188, Maltalbano on p. 190,
Worland on p. 190 and Elsaesser on p. 197). Often, these observations
that Deaville claims have been overlooked by others actually contribute
little to his argument. Yet when it comes to the musical examples in his
essay, he is the one who presents a predicament for the reader. Why is
the bottom staff of Figure 11.1, labelled ‘Piano’, notated in the
perplexing French violin clef (G clef on the first line) and not in treble
clef (G clef on the second line)? This is probably a mistake in the transcription of the example, not subsequently caught by the proofreader.
This oversight detracts from his argument, which is unfortunate, especially considering his rather pretentious criticism of the arguments made
by others. Otherwise, Deaville’s essay is very insightful.
Lloyd Whitesell’s ‘Quieting the Ghosts in The Sixth Sense and The Others’
was a pleasure to read, with useful musical examples neatly dovetailed
into the text. As in the essay by Halfyard, some of the musical examples
appear to be reproduced in slightly different sizes from others, which to
my eye, makes some stand out as possible formatting errors. Although I
have not seen the two films he discusses, he leads the reader from one
point to the next in a way that is extremely easy to follow.
I have chosen to discuss the subsequent two essays together, as I
believe they address a reader much more as film scholar than musicologist. Joe Tompkins’s ‘Pop Goes the Horror Score: Left Alone in The Last
House on the Left’, like the essays by Brown and Link, contains no musical
exemplification, and, although very well written, dedicates the least
amount of space to the discussion of music of all the essays in the
anthology. Although I was surprised that James Buhler’s ‘Music and the
Adult Ideal in A Nightmare on Elm Street’ did not mention music in any
detail until four-and-a-half pages into the essay, I enjoyed his depiction
of the slasher subgenre and, in particular, the concepts of the ‘final girl’
and the ‘adult ideal’. His analysis of the slasher subgenre and of the
position of Nightmare on Elm Street in that particular subgenre is informative and extremely well thought-out.
In general, this attractive volume is a well-balanced blend of film scholarship and musicology, and represents a welcome step forward in the
synthesis of the two comparable disciplines. If subsequent volumes in this
MSMI
5:1 Spring 11
Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film
105
♦
review by Charles Leinberger
new series from Routledge are as practical, insightful and informative as
Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, then this series should draw the
interest of readers from both areas. This volume could easily be adopted
for an undergraduate course on horror film for students majoring in film
studies or music, or possibly a graduate class that includes a horror film
component, along with other genres.
