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Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant: (Stephen
Trask) So you want to get rich quick? Forget all those annoying scams
you see on television and online. Instead, write a series of novels
about teenagers coming into contact with vampire cultures. Twist the
vampire mythos however you desire; let not historical precedence inform
your narrative. Saturate your story with coming of age and
self-discovery subplots, interpersonal conflicts of a high school
setting, and throw in some marginally original fantasy elements to cover
your ass from a plagiarism lawsuit. Market your simplistic novels to the
teenage crowd and await a healthy check from a studio or producer
interested in translating several of your novels into what hopefully
will yield a franchise of films, even if it means cramming and twisting
parts of several of your books into a cliffhanger of a first film. Have
that film released around Halloween and hope for its marketing campaign
to go viral. After all, young people, for some strange reason, love
vampires these days, and when is there a better time than Halloween to
suck the cash from their cheap plastic wallets and purses? The good news
is that despite the 2009 Universal film
Cirque du Freak: The
Vampire's Assistant following this formula precisely, there are no
signs that studios plan to abandon their plight for vampire profits
anytime soon. Based on Darren Shan's "Vampire Blood" trilogy,
The
Vampire's Assistant covers plot fragments from several novels,
leaving all the basic, stereotypical pieces of the story hanging for a
sequel that hopefully will never come. It suffices to say that some
young, handsome dip gets involved by accident with a vampire culture at
war for centuries and he has to become one of them to save a friend,
fulfill a debt, reject his new powers, meet strange people, and
eventually look super-cool. Unfortunately, along with the evolution of
the vampire sub-genre of horror films from Hollywood towards the quality
of mindless, lower budget trash, so too has the music in these films
lost its way. Over the thirty years prior to
The Vampire's
Assistant, the scores for vampire films have gone from the realm of
John Williams, Wojciech Kilar, George Fenton, and Elliot Goldenthal to
that of Richard Gibbs, Jonathan Davis, Carter Burwell, and Stephen
Trask. As a result, the music for these films continues to scratch
tediously at the walls.
Trask's score for
The Vampire's Assistant once
again reinforces that the genre's sound has lost its truly stirring
gothic personality despite the sometimes impressive attempts to
resurrect it from the dead. This particular entry makes more of an
effort to stir the pot than what Gibbs and Davis managed for
Queen of
the Damned or Burwell's completely limp
Twilight. The closest
relative to
The Vampire's Assistant in musical terms is indeed
Queen of the Damned, for you can hear another time the results of
a rock band member attempting to contribute a massively-conceived
orchestral score and failing to bring all the pieces together into a
compelling package. Trask's career officially entered the film score
scene with a bang upon 2001's
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but he
has since failed to really make a name for himself with the small-scale,
intimate film scores he's been involved with in his sixteen scores
leading up to
The Vampire's Assistant. It's clear that this
vampire production wanted a score that blended traditional gothic
sensibilities from orchestral and choral tones with a slight touch of
electronic manipulation and other methods of modernizing the genre for
the target audience. Trask raises a significant amount of ruckus from
the Hollywood Studio Symphony for
The Vampire's Assistant, mixing
in some of the ambient vocal and keyboarded soundscapes heard in
Queen of the Damned. The style of the orchestra's arrangement and
occasional compositional structures resembles that of Danny Elfman on
the surface, though this similarity is more than likely due to the
involvement of Steve Bartek and other regulars in Elfman's crew on this
project. The unique accents, most commonly taking the form of dissonant
and sometimes shrill vocal effects (usually heard in the first half) or
straight sound effects of a wind-blowing variety, seem like leftovers
from both
Queen of the Damned and Dario Marianelli's
The
Brothers Grimm, though their application here is not as distinctive
as in those two previous works. Light ensemble choral effects offer some
of the score's harmonious moments of wonder, though these passages in
the second half are often short and lacking in convincing depth. The
whistling and mandolin character heard in "The Whistle Song" at the
start is not explored or reinforced in the remainder of the score. For
some, this will be a plus.
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Alone, the texture that Trask creates for
The
Vampire's Assistant is sufficient in meeting the basic needs of the
film, but having the right feel for a genre cannot typically alone make
for a successful score. Bruno Coulais' music for
Coraline earlier
in the year managed to accomplish this feat, but nothing from Trask
matches the same devilish creativity. There exists no inherent narrative
to the music for
The Vampire's Assistant, nor is there a truly
consistent set of motifs or sounds that can immediately identify the
work at any moment. Harmony comes at a premium and themes are extremely
elusive. The opening title track introduces a rhythmic figure, a
rambling ostinato that does recur throughout portions of the score and
is the piece of the puzzle that most listeners will recognize from the
stylebook of Elfman. For all the spirit and tenacity that rips and
snorts by the end of that "The Vampire's Assistant" cue, there is still
no thematic representation of any clarity to emerge from the slapping
mess of noise. The longer you wait for Trask to give this score an
enduring identity, the more dissatisfying it becomes. You ultimately
have to be patient until the last cue, "Vampire Bird," when a cohesive
melodic element finally comes into play. By then, you get the impression
that this crescendo of theme is meant to suggest events to come in
another film, and while it's nice to hear some semblance of continuity
perhaps in development, the last three minutes of the score are far too
late for this to occur. The entirety of
The Vampire's Assistant
sounds like a stream of consciousness effort, handling each scene with
rather generic orchestral procedures and thumping electronic
enhancements. The occasional modern sensibility, as in the guitar and
male vocal combination in "You Can't Just Leave," isn't vibrant or
substantial enough to give the score crossover appeal. Slight industrial
tones, like the metallic percussive sounds in "Rooftop," even when aided
by droning bass power, also fail to do the same. Perhaps if Trask had
better integrated the catchy mandolin and whistling tune heard at the
outset, the score might have transformed into a somewhat memorable
piece. An extremely long album featuring only the score becomes tiring
by its concluding four tracks, which feature some compositional
contributions by others in Trask's team. An intimate mix, extending to
even the other-worldly female vocal effects, doesn't help in producing a
fantasy environment. In the end, this drifting score does its job, but
barely.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about the
score or film.
