Strange Bedfellows

Music in film. I won’t research it, but I have to imagine this topic has been covered in the NAP more than once. I don’t think bringing it up would belabor it, either, and unless you’re some sort of creepy NAP completist (which I am), who also happens to have a flawless memory (which I don’t), then this is where we’re heading today. In particular, I want to talk about the music and sound used in two specific horror films.

I began thinking about this topic just two days ago as I was giving every last bit of attention I could into trying to finally watch Phantasm in one sitting. Boy, cinematically speaking, that movie does not give you a lot to work with. In fact, that thing is a calamity pretty much from the start clear through to the moment at which I threw in the towel. I worked with it. I took breaks. I wept. I had a snack. I downed several bloody marys. I just don’t have it in me. It’s kind of like the cultural antithesis to Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve worked that bitch over a few times too, and still can’t finish it.

Now hear me out. I love difficult work. I buried Gravity’s Rainbow. Loved it. I even read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, all 1600 plus pages of it. It was riveting. Granted, not a tough read content-wise, just real goddamn long. Crime and Punishment. Check. Godel, Escher, & Bach, in the can. Phantasm? It’s beyond me.

And quite frankly I am actually feeling pangs of guilt over this. And I think that’s because there is a lot going for it.

For one thing, it’s totally weird in a good way. Grave-robbing hunchbacked midget monster aliens, led by a very tall and insanely creepy old dude who says little more than “Boy,” invade a small town by running the local funeral home just so they can execute their plan to steal all of earth’s corpses to bring back home and force into slave labor.

Oh sure, okay.

Fortunately, this kid named Mike (who looks a little too much like I did at that age) tosses a wrench into the works.

Hijinks ensue.

That’s the plot.

Oh yeah, there’s also this orb thing that flies through the air and implants itself in the skulls of its hapless victims and then pumps all their blood out the back end like a garden hose.

Hey, why not?

And then there’s the music and the sound design.

I thought that both of these elements are what propel Phantasm directly past almost any other schlock/horror movie of its era. Truly. The sound effects, while ridiculous, also paint a fairly uneasy feeling throughout the whole thing. They pretty much lay the groundwork for what you’re seeing, basically being akin to a really crazy dream. And underlying the scraping and dragging and clicking noises that never really stop is the music. The music is a weird mix of atonal electronic swells and washes which actually manage to not sound dated at all, and it’s actually not something I would laugh at were I to catch someone creating it on stage today. There’s also this odd, percussive ambiance mixed in which reminds me of tabla playing, though much more subtle. Still, the non-western influence is definitely there, which is really cool considering how American Phantasm seems to be in virtually every other way.

And then you have the theme track, which is basically a riff on John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween (which happens to be possibly my second favorite piece of movie music next to Popol Vuh’s soundtrack theme for Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God). It’s kind of a creepy organ sound, which is good. And, like the Halloween music, it’s a small pattern that is basically repeated, reiterated, broken down, and rebuilt throughout the movie.

So, I felt guilty when I simply couldn’t take it anymore. It’s always at the same spot, too. It’s the bit where the kid is fighting with the finger he cut off the Tall Man. He puts it in a box, where it bleeds milky yellow crap and won’t stop wiggling. Eventually, for no apparent reason, the finger turns into a sort of insect that looks as real as those rubber spiders you can buy at Walgreens. Okay, it looks worse even that that. Honestly. It does. The kid throws his shirt over it, and then he and his brother work real hard at looking like they aren’t throwing a shirt around as if something is in it when obviously they are just horrifically untalented actors. That scene is so bad in such a bad way that I give in and turn the movie off.

And the second movie I want to mention is E Elias Merhige’s Begotten. I find it a soothing counterpoint to the more, uh, accessible charms of Coscarelli’s Phantasm. Begotten is a grainy, scratchy tone piece (literally, as it turns out, as the half-tones have been bled out in post-production) which has to be seen to be believed. It’s been compared to Eraserhead, which is really kind of lazy. Sure, you could say they are both strange, black-and-white, and impossible to fully grasp, but beyond that, they have almost nothing in common. But, to be fair, when you are dealing with films of this sort, there’s really not a shit ton of stuff that you can hold next to it in comparison. Watching Begotten is like watching a snuff film nightmare from hell, times a million. I won’t bother going into the plot. There really isn’t one; which is to say, there is one, but it’s rather open-ended. It’s basically a sort of riff on the biblical myth of creation told through the almost-certainly deeply subjective and deeply personal point of view of the director. You know, just like Phantasm!

And while there really isn’t music to speak of in the soundtrack, there is a litany of very uncomfortable sound effects that etch their way onto your brain from the get go. Underlying the entire soundtrack is a chorus of chirping crickets. This never stops. Then there is the constant rumble of scratches, rubbing sounds, guttural vocalizations, and other delightful and nuanced stuff of the sort. In the end, it actually does all add up to be a musical experience. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that I find the sound design of Begotten to bear more than a passing resemblance to the sound design of Phantasm. As it turns out, seeing both films back-to-back left a fairly cool world of sound buried at the bottom of my sleep-deprived brain — albeit from almost polar opposite ends of the horror spectrum.