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Drag Me to Hell: (Christopher Young) Not many
legitimate horror films can claim success in entertaining audiences
these days with a PG-13 rating, though Sam Raimi's 2009 nightmare
Drag Me to Hell accomplished just that. The script he wrote with
his brother a decade earlier was intended to bypass the usual genre
technique of utilizing an excess of gore to achieve its goals, instead
emphasizing an element of morality that also happened to play upon the
unpopular opinion that many in the public espoused about banks and loan
officers at the time. A young woman trying to prove her worth to the
boss at her financial institution competitively denies a third loan
extension to an elderly gypsy woman, setting forth a curse that would
inevitably drag her to Hell in three days. Her efforts to seek fortune
tellers and mediums to rid herself of a tormenting demon leads to an
attempted seance and gruesome acts of sacrifice and grave mutilation
that are more unsavory than horrifying. Part of the appeal of
Drag Me
to Hell is its comedic aspect; whether intentional or not, Raimi
offers a wealth of morbid humor that pokes fun at religion-induced fear.
Another intriguing plot twist is the generally unlikable nature of the
heroine; between the selling of her soul to an establishment of
capitalism, her willful killing of her pet kitten, and her bumbling
stupidity in the handling of her intended salvation, it's not hard to
root against her (and her rather unhelpful, dippy, likely Mac-loving
boyfriend) and cheer the opening of the furious pits of Hell at the
not-so-surprising end. Raimi had a long-established working
collaboration with Christopher Young, eventually using the composer's
services to help push Danny Elfman out of the
Spider-Man
franchise. Young, of course, is the foremost master of the horror genre
in the Los Angeles establishment of film scoring, developing a keen
sense of instrumental creativity in the field during the 1980's and
1990's and emulated by the likes of Marco Beltrami and John Frizzell,
among others, since. Young's demonstrated ability to twist orchestral
cliches in the genre into seemingly fresh ideas is remarkable, whether
in the subdued thriller end of the spectrum or the bloated, colorful
extravaganzas like
Hellraiser II that cemented his reputation. In
recent years, his efforts to unsettle audiences have resided in the
low-key range, with subtle, easy-to-digest music for
Untraceable
and
The Uninvited above average in quality and meriting nearly
effortless album rearrangements for harmonically spooky listening
experiences.
While
Drag Me to Hell has a few secondary paths of
exploration that will remind listeners of the likes of
Untraceable and
The Uninvited (and
Copycat and
Jennifer 8 if you go back further), Young took the opportunity
that Raimi presented him to write music of a grand scale not often
conveyed in the genre. The resulting carnival of explosive waltzes and
unconventional stingers overshadows the moments of eerie atmosphere and
sympathetic character material in
Drag Me to Hell. While the
quality of this score is equal to, if not greater than, Young's
remarkable fantasy scores (such as
Species and
The Fly
II), this entry is so overwhelmingly wild in its approach to the
topic that it has no chance of translating into a fluid listening
experience. It's a highly compartmentalized score, despite the effective
insertion of the overarching title theme into a multitude of facets, and
the whole is easily divided into four major components. The title theme
and its virtuoso violin performances are one distinct highlight, opening
and closing the soundtrack album with gruesome elegance of alluringly
morbid grace. Young decided to employ the violin as the most refined
representation of the demons, extending it in the movement of a
Hungarian-style waltz to address the gypsy element of the plot. Such
classical violin performance emphasis is rarely employed with satisfying
appeal in mainstream film scores, James Newton Howard's
Defiance
a recent success. Young managed to incorporate Joshua Bell-like violin
roles into two of his 2009 scores, however, punctuating the enticingly
harmonic beauty of pure evil in
Drag Me to Hell and applying far
more romantic variations on the instrumental technique in his restrained
but pretty score for
Creation that followed. The progressions
handled by the violin in
Drag Me to Hell are sometimes so
complicated (reflecting what Young refers to as a demon's performance
with ten fingers on the strings and an independently floating bow) that
they required two overdubbed performances to complete. There is no
question that the violins' classical stature over Young's usual deep
choral tones, cymbal crashes, and pipe organ yield this score's true
heart. It's a unique one at that, with only John Ottman's
Apt
Pupil even approaching the same territory. Another interesting
aspect of this theme is the pounding of ensemble hits that announce its
conclusion; whereas those in
Hellraiser II resolved to key, the
ones here are always a note off of the harmonic scale, producing an
off-kilter feeling of unfinished business on a mass scale.
For some listeners, Young's intent of leaving a slight
feeling of unresolved harmony will make the title theme for
Drag Me
to Hell difficult to appreciate on its own. You can definitely tell
from the common conclusions to "Drag Me to Hell" and "Concerto to Hell"
that the composer did not seek to cleanly conclude his tormented theme
for this score on a satisfying note. A final, rising solo violin
crescendo, in fact, sounds like a sick variant on the concluding bars of
the end credits from
Moulin Rouge. Still, an inherent sense of
melodramatic lyricism with an overwhelming adult choir prevails as the
general attitude of the work, featuring movements enunciated with such
sway over the voices that you might think you're hearing an
excruciatingly demented manipulation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's
Joseph
and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. A series of two-note pairs
(leading directly above and below key) introduce the title theme and are
malleable as a reminder of the theme's prowess throughout the score.
Fans of Young's often bold low brass usage will love its forceful
pairing with bass strings to cram the key of the piece down your throat.
There could be some debate about whether or not the old gypsy woman has
her own dedicated theme in
Drag Me to Hell; much of her material
seems spawned from the same waltz-inspired constructs that sculpt the
title theme. Definitely a part of the second distinct aspect of Young's
material is the duo of dedicated horror stingers and unconventional use
of voices for the outright frightening scenes. More than perhaps any
other composer, Young is able to continuously provide this kind of music
in fresh incarnations, his own recorded moaning in "Loose Teeth" almost
scary to the point of comedy. A fair amount of manipulation and plain
old fashioned dissonance of the most shrieking nature carries cues like
"Lamia," with extraordinarily harsh brass and shrill vocals that mirror
the tone of Don Davis'
The Matrix Revolutions. That particular
cue has two little nuggets of grandiose Young harmony mixed in between
the ruckus, first in the form of a spirited waltz at about 2:20 and then
in an almost tingling fantasy progression at 3:20. Those more impressed
by Young's most uncomfortable techniques will appreciate the prickling
string lines in "Ode to Ganush" and "Muttled Buttled Brain Stew." The
stingers in the latter cue include wild octave runs by trumpets that
will surely disturb anyone else in the room. The forceful rhythmic
adaptation of the title theme to open "Auto-Da-Fe" has the same brutal
sense of the inevitable (aided by slapped percussion and rambling pipe
organ) that highlighted Frizzell's Juggernaut material from
Thirteen
Ghosts.
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The remaining two compartmentalized sections of
Drag
Me to Hell produce the score's softer, melodic appeal, the usual
harmonic aspects of any effectively evocative Young score. Most
interesting is Young's surprisingly sweet theme for the loan officer
herself. Given that she's not exactly the most sympathetic of
characters, it's curious to hear such a redemptive idea for her. Perhaps
this is just Young's method of contrasting the horror material to the
point of yielding a red herring. Rather simplistic and repetitive, this
theme is delicately conveyed via piano and other light percussion over
soothing strings in "Tale of a Haunted Banker," "Familiar Familiars,"
and "Brick Dogs a la Carte," each performance slowing the pace of the
theme and applying progressively more trepidation. Amounting to about
six minutes on album, these three cues are a welcome relief from the
exhausting horror material and a good match for a compilation with the
themes from Young's two recent, aforementioned thrillers. The final
individual section of
Drag Me to Hell is the atmospheric mystery
component. These sequences are highlighted by ethereal, high-range
female vocalizations of the primary theme, heard first in the opening
two minutes of "Mexican Devil Disaster" and extended through the
majority of "Ordeal By Corpse." The dissonant side of these unnerving
cues is represented in "Black Rainbows" and "Bealing Bells With
Trumpet," both of which minimizing the volume but maintaining the
appropriate environment though rough plucking, high-pitched whining, and
the score's only clearly evident electronic manipulation. For listeners
turned off by the grandiose half of
Drag Me to Hell, you could
probably glean ten minutes of superb light harmony of usual Young
fashion for these kinds of films. But the mammoth title theme is what
will truly impress any listener of the score, offering another ten
minutes of rowdy Young bombast at levels not heard in decades. As an
overall album, the 52 minutes of music from
Drag Me to Hell is
inherently extremely unpredictable, suffering the trademarks of any
adept horror score. There is no doubt that this composition is a work of
art, and even you typically recoil at extremely ambitious horror
strikes, those offered by Young in this score merit at least your
appreciation for their complexity in design and execution. Its title
waltz is extremely memorable, the concluding track worthy of a
challenging concert arrangement, but be prepared for Young's obvious
refusal to state the theme with a sense of harmonious resolution. To say
that the composer overachieved once again in a horror assignment is
becoming the normal statement about such endeavors. This time, however,
the overachievement is monumentally hell-raising.
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Music as Written for the Film: *****
Music as Heard on Album: ****
Overall: ****
| Bias Check: | For Christopher Young reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.3 (in 23 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.99
(in 7,951 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert includes a note from the composer about the score.
