Shadowbuilder: Temp Score to Final Score
by Roman Deppe
Before you folks skip this daily column with the words "I am not
interested in movies I never heard of," let me tell you something
about it...
Bram Stoker's SHADOWBUILDER is the story of a powerful demon (or better
yet, the devil), who is able to destroy the world during a certain eclipse
of the sun by killing a young child. The Shadowbuilder is a creature who
lives on the life-energy of its victims, and similar to Count Dracula he
sucks it out of them--if light hits their bodies they fall apart to ashes.
Now it is shortly before such an eclipse and the Shadowbuilder appears
in a small city, somewhere in the USA. On his search for the child his
victims infect more and more people and the darkness, he brings makes the
people go insane and go berserk. It is the job of a priest (who has seen
one too many John Woo films), the aunt of the young boy and her boyfriend
and a crazy scrap dealer to prevent the eternal darkness...
Well, the movie is such a wild mix of a lot of movies as the story sounds
like... DRACULA, WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON, NEEDFUL THINGS, THE OMEN, even
THE FOG (6 people have to die)... but although it doesn't tell anything
new or really original it is nevertheless an above-the-average Horror-Fantasy-movie,
filled with impressive special-effects, good atmosphere, strong directing
and photography and a cool cast, including Michael Rooker as the gun-fighting
priest ("I kick ass for the lord" from Braindead comes to mind)
and Tony Todd as the crazy Scrap Dealer. I don't know whether it is already
released in the States, but it came out on video recently here in Germany.
The movie is not a big-budget project, but it looks much more expensive
than it probably was, thanks to the director, who was an ILM-wizard for
several years. It is also nice that the movie relies more on atmosphere
than on gore, so you can use your imagination, which is very rare nowadays.
Okay, but what has that to do with FSM? Well, I attended Shadowbuilder's
world premiere last year at the Fantasy Film Festival, but they couldn't
finish it in time, so still there was one scene missing and its music wasn't
written yet. So, what was shown was the version the composer got, filled
with all the temp-tracks composers are afraid of. I can't say how distracting
these temporary cues must be for composers, but they were very distracting
for me in the beginning, because I knew all of them so well. Just think
of this: The Main Titles start and you get HELLRAISER's main titles, suddenly
switching into the electronic music of the same score, than some outbursts
of "Ave Satani" from THE OMEN, switching into SPECIES' chase
music. It seemed almost no one noticed in the audience, but it was hard
to keep myself from paying attention to the music. It was very interesting
to hear how closely to the movie the music got edited. There was almost
no cue played in its original length, mostly only some bars, switching
from one score and style to another. So, the so-to-speak-main theme was
HELLRAISER and tons of choral music from THE OMEN and NEEDFUL THINGS and
it was obvious that the makers were very into Christopher Young's music.
I couldn't wait to see the movie in its finished form and to hear what
the composer came up with and now almost one year later the opportunity
was there...
The credits looked interesting at the premiere, the music was credited
to a Guy Zerafa and in the end credits it was mentioned that the main theme
was some kind of French hymn, and some featured musicians were listed,
so it looked as if the movie would get kind of chamber music score or even
ethnic, but as it turned out Guy Zerafa's score didn't end up in the movie.
Whether his score was rejected or whether he just hadn't had time I don't
know, but finally the music was composed by Eckart Seeber, surely a German
composer.
So, what's his music like? Well, it is half the music you expect from
a movie like this and half not. It is basically an orchestral score with
lenghty choral passages. The choir is actually used to such a big extent,
that I thought many times, that less could have been more. Seeber wrote
a very catchy 6 note-main theme, that sounds (as much of the music) very
in the style of movies in the '50s and '60s, kind of music for all those
big roman empire-movies. Seeber is certainly inspired by the older composers
like Rosza. It is actually one of the most memorable themes I heard in
recent times, that captures the mood of a quiet, peaceful town and tragic
fate pretty well, but it is also used in the fast horror-passages, adding
a lot of tension and even gives the young boy some heroism.
Seeber seemed affected by the temp tracks only in the very beginning,
where some priests sacrifice a man to resurrect the demon. Here you can
hear the electronic sound-sculptures from HELLRAISER. When the action begins
you can hear the chase music from SPECIES, but interestingly only in terms
of instrumentation, not in melodies, so the hammering electronic piano
appears during the shootouts. After that Seeber introduces his main theme
and a dark theme for the gun-fighting priest, which unfortunately is not
really used again. When the Shadowbuilder begins his evil work the choir
comes in extensively. Only in the cemetery scene (where they find a dead
body) Seeber falls back to the temp-track; the choir is very similar to
THE OMEN, but right after that he completely ignores the temps for the
rest of the movie and wrote his non-temped choir material. I have to admit
that in these scenes the temps worked so well, that there was almost no
other way how to score these scenes. He later even brings in some quite
unusual things for a Hollywood product, some high, scratching strings and
a (little bit irritating) singing female solo singer (his wife(?) Cristine
Seeber) over the full choir (like Beltrami used the solo singer in MIMIC
and SCREAM, but here with Latin lyrics). These aspects make the score sound
more kind of European than American and I assume it is because Seeber is
from Europe. It is nice to see, that the makers and the composer tried
to do something different within their given limitations and that the makers
were not insisting to copy the temp-tracks, which worked very well all
the way through.
BUT: This was the first time I ever thought that a movie was spotted
badly. There is way too much music in it (of the movie's 100 minutes, there
is certainly 90 minutes of score) and many scenes didn't need music. Often
the music stops only for 10 seconds and then comes in again, what makes
irritating holes. It's not like a pause of the music: the piece stops (to
add some tension maybe), and ten seconds later another piece begins with
no connection to the former one. It sounds as if they let Seeber score
the whole 100 minutes and took the music out at the places where they wanted
to (and had no knowledge of music, anyway).
Nevertheless, it is a very good score for a good movie, that probably
has no one seen. The score may not be highly original, but it is very effective
in the movie, can stand on its own and would please every horror-fan and
choir-buff. But I doubt there will be a CD release (although I think it
was recorded in Europe...).
If anyone has any information about Eckart Seeber and where this score
was recorded or what happened to Guy Zerafa's score or just information
in general on these subjects (or questions), please write in.
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
(Roman Deppe can be reached at roman.deppe@metronet.de)
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