Frailty

by Jeff Bond

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 2, on sale now...

After a decade of serial killer movies that depict these dangerous killers as something akin to supernatural monsters, Bill Paxton's Frailty takes a much more human approach to the situation by focusing on the toll taken on a single-parent family when the parent is driven to kill and brings his children in on the acts. The result is a powerful psychological thriller that is part Hitchcock, part To Kill a Mockingbird. Composer Brian Tyler has made such unusual fare a specialty, starting out with the peculiar Six String Samurai and moving on to films like the William H. Macy drama Panic and the upcoming, bizarre Bubba Ho-Tep. While personal relationships are often the best way for up-and-coming composers to win jobs, Tyler says his assignment on Frailty had nothing to do with that. "In terms of Frailty, it was kind of an out-of-the-blue situation where I had no relationships with anyone on the movie but they heard my CD and there was a track they used for the main title track. I met with Bill Paxton and we hit it off right away and he started talking about all these strange musical directions he wanted to go into and I had the script and started talking about odd combinations of things, combinations of strange medieval music with things like Stockhausen. And he's really well-versed in music, both classical and contemporary, but he's really into Stockhausen and is the only guy I know on the planet who has Stockhausen records and he couldn't believe that I mentioned that. He wanted a biblical aspect to the score."

Frailty opens very much as a standard serial killer film, with black-and-white photo images and a moody, foreboding theme from Tyler. The melody is actually put to use far differently than one might expect once the film segues from a scene at an FBI office to a flashback to 1979. In the film, director Paxton plays the father of two young boys who's raising them himself after the death of their mother. Paxton seems an ideal single dad until he enters the boys' room one night and tells them that an angel has appeared to him and ordered him to begin slaying demons hidden in human form on Earth -- all with the help of his two young boys. "There's a bit of a red herring dangled out there toward the beginning," Tyler acknowledges. "But I think it's pretty right on because there's such a medieval, gothic, biblical strain that goes from the beginning to the last scene. You have the wrath of God, Cain and Abel, Abraham sacrificing Isaac and is the father going to kill his own child, and I tried to have the music play in a way that would make the viewer think the dad character in the movie is crazy, kind of a zealot and an obsessed fanatic. We definitely want to lead them down that road but at the same time any presence of choir or anything patently spiritual in the music should be giving you the hint that hey, this could be real. It's not so atonal and crazy music like The Shining and that kind of thing that would lead you to believe that okay, dad is a complete lunatic and is killing people for no reason. That was the idea of having a melodic score, and we wanted the theme to be something that when played on the piano could be a love theme for the father and son more than just horror."

A crucial element of the film involves the point of view of several scenes and exactly what happens to the two boys as they grow into manhood in the aftermath of the experience. Part of Tyler's job was to underscore the emotions without giving away some crucial plot twists. "The one kid is harp and the other kid is piano, and their themes are in kind of a faux waltz form and it keeps this kind of buoyancy going, but when played at the low end with celli and all that guttural instrumentation it becomes a bit darker, " Tyler notes. "The identity of the brothers becomes a little bit blurred, so the themes start the same and there's a different section for the Fenton character and when the identities start to mix, I always played one theme under one character and one under the other, but they do begin to blur as the film goes on. It became a hazard that I knew the different twists that the story had, because how much am I supposed to telegraph and how much knowledge of this am I supposed to have from a musical standpoint. That became a real challenge because I'd bring in a theme and I'd say hold on, I'm not supposed to do that yet because we don't know this about him yet, and I'm not even sure at what point the one son starts to believe his father or starts to doubt him."

Check out the full story in FSM Vol. 7, No. 2.

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