Buy it... if eight minutes of Christopher Young's usual dose of harmonic suspense material of solemn beauty, this time in the form of eerily layered female vocals, merits the exploration of the entire score.

Avoid it... if you have difficulty appreciating Young's accomplished horror writing despite its intelligence, because The Uninvited is dominated by highly troubled vocal atmosphere with smart constructs that are extremely hard to casually enjoy.

Young

The Uninvited: (Christopher Young) With remakes of Asian horror films proven fiscally viable in America in the mid-2000's, Dreamworks bankrolled the adaptation of a 2003 Korean production called A Tale of Two Sisters. Renamed The Uninvited, the concept portrayed a mentally unstable young woman dealing with visions of ghosts and delusions of plots to harm her family. Living in a creepy coastal mansion, of course, is a prerequisite for this kind of nightmare, and the girl struggles within that environment to untangle the relationships between her and her sister, her dead mother, her father's fiancee who was once her terminally ill mother's nurse, a mental institution, and the frustrating behavior of her father. Unfortunately, the script of the 2009 remake, in the process of being toned back in terms of gore, was forced to rely upon an overarching plot surprise that was rather shallow and easy to deduce. The film did not live up to the namesake shared by an American 1944 classic of the haunted house genre, grossing decently but shrugged off by critics. The assignment for the film's score was appropriately filled by horror and suspense veteran Christopher Young, though topics of this nature are more often the domain of John Ottman in the younger generation of composers. Interestingly, the resulting score by Young has some characteristics that will remind listeners of Ottman's style for such films (which itself is likely derived in some small way from Young's writing), though there are choral techniques in the finished score for The Uninvited that served as a clear precursor to Young's massively creative Drag Me to Hell later the same year. His music for these films is always effective, but the trick to their appeal on album (outside of a small minority of listeners who seem to able to derive relaxing enjoyment out of gruesome dissonance of the most troubled nature) has always been the varying amount of harmonic suspense music that sends chills down your spine with its solitary beauty. Scores like Copycat and Species are best known for such haunting allure, and Young had explored similar lines in his overachieving music for Untraceable not long before The Uninvited. This time around, Young limits such easily digestible music to just a couple of cues and uses the remainder to twist the cleverly vocalized thematic identity in those recordings into frighteningly tormented variations. In this regard, the entirety of the score is extremely intelligent and worthy of appreciation even if, like the superior Drag Me to Hell, it's not an easy album to casually enjoy. Don't play it for your roommates in the middle of the night.

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Two themes run throughout The Uninvited, both manipulated significantly during the score to represent the main character's delusional behavior and warped sense of reality. Young's most intriguing idea for the score exists in the complimentary vocal layers of female tones for the listless, seemingly unanchored title theme. The primary voice has an operatic quality not entirely dissimilar to John Williams' ethereal portions of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, though when the second voice explores a harmonic line above the primary one, clearly meant to enunciate the presence of the girl's sister, the combined tone becomes eerily detached. The two harmonic presentations of this theme open and close the album, the latter track exploring a resolution with the two voices over solemn bass strings that is as lovely as anything produced by Young in his career. The short snippets of this theme interspersed especially in the latter half of the score are a welcomed respite from the more dissonant filler material that otherwise occupies the majority of the work. The last track also features a chopping suspense motif with fantastic pulsating performance emphasis from the violins. The second actual theme is expressed by piano and is the composer's usual representation of family living gone wrong in a sinister fashion. Heard first in "Twice Told Tales" and ominously dying in the last seconds of the score, this theme is Young's go-to device for shivers relating to family dysfunction. The rest of the score is interesting in its application of two key elements: the vocal layers and a glass harmonica. The vocals are handled with devious attention to detail, flowing in and out of traditional sung performances with spoken or whispered interludes as the sanity of any given moment is questioned. The middle portions of the score are especially deceptive in how the vocals could represent either the girl's sister or her mother; either way, though, there is not much in terms of pleasant atmosphere from the 20 singers throughout these passages. The 70+ orchestral players are heavy on the strings, with just a few woodwinds and French horns to expand the soundscape. The glass harmonica is as intoxicating as always; it's no wonder people used to think that the instrument drove its performers mad. It is not mixed as prominently into the final edit, however, as it could have been. Outside of this notable accent, none of the instrumental players is afforded a particularly prominent role. The majority of the score exists in the treble, though a driving, seemingly electronically-enhanced rhythm on key in "A Dance With No One" will recall some of Brian Tyler's muscular horror ideas. Overall, The Uninvited is a very functional genre score with 8 to 10 minutes of compilation-worthy moments of harmonic suspense. Given the quality of the film, Young overachieves once again. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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.