: (Marco Beltrami) During the resurgence of
slashing teenie horror flicks in the 1990's, few franchises fared better
than the one born from
. The concept by Wes Craven and
Kevin Williamson took the infamous ghost-masked killer on a rampage in
the suburban town of Woodsboro, leading most of its primary characters
to the grave without good reason while elevating the cult status of its
surviving lead played by Neve Campbell. The success of the 1996 original
was rooted in its convoluted character mysteries, causing young
audiences to see the film several times in the theatres to detect hidden
clues and meanings and thus making a monstrous financial success out of
a movie that cost practically nothing to produce. A sequel was rushed
quickly and without much artistic thought, but it fared just as well for
the same young audiences. Also of intrigue in the franchise is its
characters' recognition of the frivolous and awkwardly humorous
ridiculousness of the horror movie genre in context, an angle notable at
first but largely lost upon the concept by its wayward, belated fourth
entry in 2011. Despite the genre's dominance at the box office in the
late 1990's, these kinds of films are not the kindest to budding
composers who are often left in the B-rate horror world to see their
careers die and rot. But the
franchise was an exception
for the rising talent of Marco Beltrami, these scores becoming an early
calling card for the composer, and within ten years, he would contribute
music for blockbuster franchises in the ranks of
. Having never been enamored with the horror genre
prior to his hiring on the original
, the composer took
inspiration from Craven and felt embarrassed as he bungled his way
through the score's creation. While his resulting music didn't create a
significant jolt in the film score world (songs, as usual, carried the
day commercially), the messy circumstances surrounding other composers'
music in
gave his own material for the concept a cult
status much like that of the films. By
at the end of the
decade, Beltrami had survived countless rumors of his replacement by
finishing the original trilogy of scores with perhaps the best-rounded
and most listenable entry of the three.
In general, Beltrami's contribution to these films
successively improved until
Scream 4, which enjoyed a far lesser
budget for its recording and reverted back to the generally non-descript
personality of the original entry and is perhaps even worse in quality.
His style for the original two
Scream scores plucked ideas from
many different places, including the works of Elliot Goldenthal, Ennio
Morricone, Christopher Young, Eric Serra, and Hans Zimmer. Most of these
influences made themselves more evident in
Scream 2, a soundtrack
with a much broader personality. On album, these first two scores were
provided together on a short product in 1998, hence the fact that this
Filmtracks review initially covered the two scores together. In
subsequent decades, Varèse Sarabande replaced this original
product with proper releases of each score separately, so the analysis
of
Scream and
Scream 2 has been divided into two reviews.
Some crossover discussion remains because of the initial 1998 album.
Despite the allure of its oddly gorgeous primary theme for Sidney, the
original
Scream score was a rather conventional entry in its era,
a basic effort by Beltrami to take a tiny budget and produce a partially
synthetic, partially orchestral score with less than 50 performers. The
recording highly economical, often sounding bigger than the ensemble
would entail, especially in his first cue (and trial run for the
filmmakers), "The Cue From Hell." In terms of technique, he combined the
slashing standards established by Young with the contemporary synthetic
styles of Serra and occasional touches of orchestral complexity from
Goldenthal and spaghetti Western mannerisms from Morricone. For the most
part,
Scream is stocked with over an hour of music that doesn't
really make great use of any of these elements; the suspense and horror
material is based upon standard dissonant atmospheres and series of
shrieking stingers that seem frightfully generic in retrospect. One
exception is the fluttering of high woodwinds as a "gut-sinking" device
during the more suspenseful moments of anticipation. The Morricone
influence for the Dewey character became a point of controversy in the
first sequel, as the filmmakers claimed that test audiences didn't
prefer it. The memorable themes in the score involve those for Sidney,
the Neve Campbell character, and the town of Woodsboro. Beltrami
intentionally left the iconic villain without a motif to accentuate
questions about his identity.
The famous, haunting solo female vocals for Sidney's
theme are indeed the voice of the franchise, embodying the scores' most
beautiful and tortured moments. In
Scream, however, this idea is
not frequently utilized, leaving many of the better renditions for the
sequels. You hear most of its original performances on the short 1998
Varèse album, including the end credits version with some
dissonance and electronic distortion in "Sidney's Lament" and a fuller,
more palatable rock-rhythmed performance in "NC-17" (titled "Sidney
Wants It" on later albums). The longer albums also include a fleeting
solo vocal performance foreshadowing
Scream 2 in "Sid's House."
The most engaging and creative cue in
Scream is "Trouble in
Woodsboro," in which Beltrami unleashes the ruckus of a wild rock and
slightly Western-based rhythm with synthetic wails, various
chain-rattling sound effects, and a synthetic choir for the ultimate in
eerie sound. Why Beltrami chose to abandon this uniquely effective and
memorable combination of Serra and Morricone thereafter is curious and
disappointing. Outside of these highlights in
Scream, the
remainder is surprisingly anonymous. On the 1998 album, the two short
snippets of outward horror are sideshows, but on the expanded products,
the listening experience is challenging to tolerate. Only in the two
lengthiest killing sequences, "The Cue From Hell" at the beginning and
"They're Crazy" at the end, does Beltrami utilize percussion and string
techniques that begin to rival Young's genre applications. The rest
finally yields a solid narrative for the score on the longer albums but
not by any means a pleasant one. Overall, the 1998 Varèse album
contains only 12 minutes from
Scream and 17 minutes from
Scream 2, one of the label's more controversial capitulations to
the fees of the musicians' unions. Without Elfman's music from
Scream
2, the album was always ridiculed, especially compared to the 30
minutes eventually available from the label for
Scream 3. In
2011, the label finally offered an expanded treatment of
Scream
alone, one limited to 2,000 copies. It's a chore to appreciate the
fuller original score at an hour in length. This presentation was
reprised in Varèse's 2016 12-CD "Little Box of Horrors" novelty
set and 2022 6-CD set containing all four of Beltrami's scores for the
franchise, the latter with a bonus CD adding six minutes of mundane,
unreleased stingers and short transitional cues on a separate disc. Also
included in 2022 is an orchestra-only version of "The Cue From Hell" and
a rather unappealing song by the composer for the movie. That set's
appeal is in the later scores, the original
Scream score
appropriate for franchise enthusiasts only.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.75
(in 28 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.79
(in 17,812 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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