INTRADA Presents:
GHOULIES/RE-ANIMATOR
Composed by RICHARD BAND
INTRADA Signature Edition ISE 1030
Spawned in a black magic ritual, the creatures in Ghoulies serve a crazed warlock who attempts to sacrifice his son. Though the boy is rescued by a repentant cultist (Eraserhead’s Jack Nance), he’s possessed years later to repeat his father’s rituals, summoning the ghoulies to terrorize his mod friends. As with many Empire films, music played an important part in Ghoulies. “At Empire, I was always trying to be different in my approach to these films, especially because we didn’t have that big Hollywood budget,” said composer Richard Band. “And whiIe I’d always intended Ghoulies’ score to have a little bit of Gremlins’ quirkiness, it also needed to go on a completely different horror slant.” Composer-orchestrator Shirley Walker assisted Band to create an offbeat sound by combining electronics and orchestra. Ghoulies’ playful, if nasty, black humor begins with a “Main Title” that establishes a brass and shaker “circus-y” theme. Other highlights of this fifteen-minute suite (Band would track a third of the film, so this is the complete score) include “Clown Room,” which uses cartoonish brass runs to poke fun at traditional “spooky” music. “Ghoulie Love” contrasts a seductive melody with the lurking ghoulies theme. The swirling orchestral attacks and darkly magical tension of “Clown Eyes” highlight the ghoulies’ more murderous antics, grandly building to a full symphonic statement for its climactic battle with the wizard, all before the ghoulies theme is reprised for the “End Credits.” Ghoulies was mixed in stereo from the ½” three-track orchestral session masters and represents that score’s first appearance on any format.
In the quirky adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft' Re-Animator, Jeffrey Combs plays Herbert West, a scientist who has discovered a fluid which brings dead tissue back to life. He involves fellow student Dan Cain and his fiancée Megan Halsey in his research by experimenting on their dead cat. Dan, fascinated by West's research, agrees to smuggle him into the hospital morgue. Things don't go exactly as planned, unleashing one of the most outrageously gory and entertaining horror films, complete with a sexually depraved talking head. Directed by Stuart Gordon, a particular fan of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score, he asked Band to convey a similarly driving and suspenseful approach. Band came back with Re-Animator’s notorious main theme, which satirically spun Psycho’s famed strings into a disco-jazz beat, all before segueing into Band’s own original theme. Band spent thousands of dollars from his own pocket to ensure a quality recording with the Rome Philharmonic, whose players went overtime as they tried to grasp the jazz rhythms of Band’s score. Another musical in-joke is Band’s twisted lullaby theme for West (“The Cat Experiment: Searching for the Body in the Morgue”). “When you’re talking about true psychosis, you always reference the father of psychology himself,” Band says. “So I inverted the theme of Jerry Goldsmith’s Freud." Skillfully combining electronics with alternately satiric and dark orchestral motifs, Band would turn a violin into the slithering meows of the zombified pet Rufus (“Where’s the Cat?: The Cellar”), the discombobulated interplay between headless body and talking head (“Body and Soul”), and West’s Mephistophelean effect on a very reluctant Cain in “Halsey’s Back.” Yet for all of the score’s satiric relentlessness, Band also conjures a beautifully tender love theme for Cain and his disapproving fiancée Meg (Barbara Crampton).
Like Herbert West’s subjects, Re-Animator’s soundtrack has refused to die through its various incarnations over the last two decades on LP and later on two different CD releases. Each version has had anomalies, ranging from truncated contents to over-processed noise reduction, reducing the stereo image and severely distorting the natural sound of the orchestra. This “ultimate” Intrada edition presents Band’s complete score (including music previously unreleased) in chronological order for the first time. With access to the composer’s original ½” three-track masters, we are able to present the score with its the natural analog sonics intact in crisp, detailed stereo sound.
This release is limited to 1000 copies.
INTRADA Signature Editions ISE 1030
Retail Price: $19.99
IN STOCK THURSDAY, MAY 14th
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.6148/.f
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