Halloween Special #2: Would you like to listen to something really scary?

I may not love Halloween, but I've always loved Halloween and its brethren. Genre cinema has always had a certain fascination for me, from a young age, and since at that time you didn't know any better over what was considered shlock by *cough* the establishment, so I happily watched anything outside of whatever my parents' program on the household's single TV was. Case in point: A couple of years ago I watched the insufferably smug 'documentary' Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, in which people generously snarked on Cannon and its infamous founders Israelian founders Golan and Globus. People who didn't have enough of a career to comment on other people's failures (Shut the fuck up, Alex Winter! No one wants or needs your opinion!) seemingly were just hired or cut into the movie when they had a ridiculous to mean-spirited anecdote to tell. Tell you what: As a kid, I didn't know that the Cannon logo was a sign of inferior, ridiculous B-movie filmmaking. Cannon films kept a pre-teen and young teen OBG happily occuppied with their obvious entertainment value, critical appraisal be damned. 

The horror genre has always been given the side-eye by *cough* serious film critics, so much that in the last years they forced themselves into a label like "elevated horror" for films which were barely genre films and in order to openly say they liked these films, but only because they are not that common, lower horror for the peasants. Me? I've always proudly wallowed in the glory of b-movies, and horror doesn't have to be elevated for me, thank you very much. One of my favorite filmmakers of all time is John Carpenter, who has a ridiculous number of modern classics under his belt: Halloween and The Thing? Two of the scariest, most relentless and well-made horror films of all time. Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York? Fantastic B-movies! In The Mouth Of Madness? Great self-referential meta-horror. Hell, even obvious second stringers like Prince Of Darkness brim with atmosphere that today's genre films - horror or other - have trouble conjuring. That Carpenter lost the plot right after Madness and his last handful of films in a quickly changing film world around him were pretty much all duds? Who cares. At least he didn't completely piss on his reputation like Dario Argento, another one of my favorites that I discovered later than Carpenter, but who suffered a similar fate: At the top of his power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then a slow decline from the mid- to late 80s on, and then some pretty bad stuff in the 1990s. But unlike Carpenter, Argento continued making films even when they went from bad to atrocious - rarely has a film maker annoyed me more than Argento shitting on his own legacy with the horrendous third part of his witch trilogy The Third Mother, then completely fuck up his next return to the titular genre in Giallo. I rarely get angry or annoyed at movies, but with these two I regretted that he hadn't hung up his black leather gloves earlier.  But I digress. 

You know what still holds up in all of Carpenter's and some of Argento's films? The music, of course. Carpenter, as minimalist and repetitive as they can be, easily composed some of the most memorable film themes of all time. Argento often had as often a shaky hand as he did good taste when piking musical artists, but when it worked - such as Bill Wyman and Terry Taylor's "Valley" that ran over the opening of Phenomena - it worked like gangbusters. The problem of some horror scores is that they are in the service of jump scares, so they are full of musical stingers. Harry Manfredini's work in the Friday The 13th film series is a good example. Some went the operatic route: Philip Glass' unforgettable music for Candyman for example, or Christopher Young's massive main title for Hellbound - Hellraiser 2. Another option is the dreamy route. Scores for Alexandre Aja's remake of Maniac and David Robert Mitchell's It Follows go the synthwave route, with impressive results. Out of the few songs on the compilation, the Hess Brothers' remake of their dad's classic "Wait For The Rain" from Last House On The Left reimagined as an atmospheric 90s-style grunge rock anthem is fantastic and was used in Eli Roth's Cabin Fever. 

So, what do you realistically get here? 27 pieces of music from scary movies, including a whooping five from Carpenter. As I like to offer my readers here at One Buck Records some exclusive content whenever possible, the suites for Friday The 13th, The Fog And Prince Of Darkness have been specifically created for this compilation. The suite for the former minimizes thus the aforementioned 'stinger' problem of a lot of Manfredini's score. 

There's a bunch of noteworhy music coming out of the horror genre, and you get to to discover or re-discover some of it right here. Have a scary time with this and, whether you celebrate or not, a happy all hallow's eve to all...