Intrada Soundtrack Forum

I've re-watched the John Badham film yesterday on DVD after a long time and I have to say it's better than I was recalling. The film is quite well-made, even though sometimes the "comedic" aspects (especially Donald Pleasance's performance) are not quite well handled. Frank Langella is a great Count Dracula, seductive and creepy, even though his performance is helped a lot by John Williams' thunderous romantic score. I just love the leaping 7th interval that opens Dracula's theme, it's seductive and sinuous while being creepy and gothic at the same time.

The DVD audio track sounds ten times better than the CD and you can hear John Williams' wonderful score in all its glory. I also noticed that the OST album is NOT a re-recording, as generally it's considered. To my ears, the performance sounds exactly the same, even though Williams edited various cues together for a more rounded "listening experience" purpose.

Other interesting tidbits:

. The OST album contains only a bit more than the half of the complete score. There are some great unreleased cues (especially a jaunty motif for the English village in the early scenes and an exciting cue for the scene where Van Helsing performs surgery on Mina's corpse) that would make a great expanded version.

. The "Night Journeys" cue was retooled for the final edit, but Williams included on the OST album also the rewritten portion ("Love Scene") for the much-maligned Maurice Binder "dream" sequence.

. In many scenes, it's only the music that carries all the dramatic and gothic power, almost to the extent of sounding "campy" in a few spots. However, Williams is a man of impeccable taste and intelligence, so he always balances the thunderous, bombastic side of the music with a creepy, almost fearful personality. In the final scenes the music reaches almost an operatic overtone that sounds like what Puccini would have written if he wrote an opera based on Bram Stoker's novel. This film reminded once more how much different this kind of Hollywood films sounds today and how impossible would be to write such a thunderous romantic score like this one.

I very much hope we'll see a properly expanded album of this magnificent score. It would be more than great to have a 2-CD set à là The Fury or The Boys from Brazil, with the complete film recording on Disc 1 and the OST album presentation on Disc 2.

I do hope Intrada will crack Universal vaults and succeeds to release this gem, even though I'm aware it's a very complicated task.

As per a on the FSM board about this a few years ago in which I assumed that it was the original recording, it was confirmed to me that the album is, in fact, a complete re-recording of the score, albeit one that is rather close to the original.

Umm, maybe my ears played tricks on me and I could be plain wrong, but the film recording sounds very much the same as the OST album recording. Several cues are of course merged/cobbled together, but it seems an editing job affair, much like the original Star Wars OST album.