Dead Can Dance
Tyler Bates brings zombies back to life in Dawn of the Dead
By Jeff Bond
Excerpted from FSM Vol. 9, No. 3...
The typical movie about brain-eating zombies comes with certain
expectations: lots of gore, nihilism, sick jokes, suspense and horror.
If you need music to accompany this scenario the standard issue comes
with electronics, lots of percussion and a chilly, uncompromising feel.
The current remake of Dawn of the
Dead from director Zack Snyder is heavier than usual on the
sick jokes (although a lot lighter on the social commentary than George
Romero's 1978 original), and oddly enough it's also heavier on music,
with some surprising moments of warmth and sympathy courtesy composer
Tyler Bates.
Bates' early work for Roger Corman (including Blue Flame, Tammy and the T-Rex and Alien Avengers I and II might seem good warm-up for a
zombie movie, but since getting started in the early '90s Bates has
balanced his more recent work between high-profile comedies and more
challenging independent fare (such as Mario Van Peebles' How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass).
Dawn of the Dead presented a
kind of fusion of those two worlds, with a great deal of comedy
courtesy screenwriter James Gunn (Scooby
Doo) and the casting of independent film mainstay Sarah Polley
in the lead role. For Bates, the job was to ground the characters'
human emotions in an otherwise unbelievable story. "The majority of all
of our creative discussion happened in our first meeting where they
hired me," the composer recalls of his initial contacts with the
filmmakers. "They were working with some temp music that I think didn't
really support the characters on a human level, and for this movie to
work, as absurd as it is, it has to have some stakes in the lives of
those involved, otherwise it's just a videogame. So the objective was,
when there were those moments to help support some of those arcs of the
characters that of course invest the audience's interest in their
survival and what they're going through -- their losses that they've
all incurred in the day or two that we've gotten to know them, but at
the same time, to have those moments happen in between some music that
has some attitude, and instead of just serving up your typical
slick-sounding electronic score I wanted the music to pay some kind of
respect to the horror and science-fiction films of the late '50s and
early '60s and then temper that with electronics and aggressive
percussion."
Despite that dictum, Bates says there are no specific musical homages
in the film -- not even to the original Romero version. "The reason we
kept it sort of general is that everybody involved with this movie, the
attitude of the director and producers was, 'let's not go out and model
this per se after this movie or that movie and let's not work with
people who do horror movies per se.' What they wanted was to bring a
group of people who could bring a fresh perspective and a combination
of that would bring a uniqueness to the film instead of someone who's
on their eleventh horror movie doing sound design or score and a
director who had been in that genre for a while. So while everyone was
very seasoned at what they they do, they had not been overtly familiar
with this particular type of film."
Fear the reaper…and themes, too
While avoiding the exclusively electronic palette of the
original score by Goblin and Dario Argento, Bates took a surprisingly
orchestral -- and sometimes thematic -- approach to the remake. The
composer says that producer Marc Abraham specifically requested this
approach. "One of his requests was, whenever the opportunity strikes,
let's not be afraid to have big themes," Bates says. After the
sprawling action of the film's opening 10 minutes, the setting narrows
to a suburban shopping mall where Sarah Polley's character is briefly
alone to recover from the horrendous loss of her husband. It's an
intimate moment scored with a warm, almost bluesy brass performance.
"We had a muted English horn there and while it's not a big theme, that
instrument is pretty traditional as a poignant element," Bates notes.
"It's a moment where there's not impending doom onscreen so we wanted
to be able to build the emotional arc for her and obviously for Luda
[Inna Korobkina], who is the pregnant woman so her moments are
numbered. My attitude about melody and theme in horror movies is that
any time there's a melody it's not very scary, unless you're talking
about Halloween, which in my
opinion is one of the greatest movie and music combinations of the
genre. We wanted to suspend that beat where we recognize that Sarah's
just lost her husband and the chain of events that's transpired is just
so bizarre that she hasn't been able to process it. She's completely in
shock and obviously suffering some loss but at the same time it's
confusing what happened, so she's despondent at the moment and that's
what the point of that was. What I chose to do to balance it just for
my own taste was instead of using a piano in that scene for melody's
sake I used tuned gongs -- I thought I could earn the English horn if I
went off the board a little bit with something we're not expecting as
much."
A big musical factor in the film is the use of Muzak playing in the
mall as ironic counterpoint to the paranoia and terror the barricaded
survivors are experiencing. Musician Tree Adams arranged these cues,
which were chosen by music supervisor G. Marq Roswell. "They completed
the Muzak cues a couple of weeks before my scoring date, so they
brought those songs to me and I was familiar enough with what was there
to determine exactly how to play against it or transition out of it.
Fortunately the director as well as the supervisor had the foresight to
see that that should be something we should think about before we get
to the dub stage."
Bates' score combines orchestral music with electronic textures to
divide the atmosphere between the epic effects of the zombie plague on
the rest of the world and the confined world of the shopping mall. "One
of the key elements of the score is the idea of transformation, which
is inevitable for anyone who's bitten by a zombie," Bates explains,
noting that the film's pregnant character created an ideal situation
for building suspense musically. "The intention was to have the
atmosphere build and become more and more alive as we anticipate her
dying and the transformation into the zombie and to not let the
audience off the hook there at all, and to keep it organic so we're not
so aware that there is music and we're not all saying 'oooh, scary'
with the low brass and low strings -- we're used to that, so what I
wanted to do was in that whole sequence which is pretty long, to give
her character the basis of that sound -- I don't even want to call it a
theme, it's more of a motif, and then that takes us out into the end of
the film where we encounter all the zombies. It's supposed to be a
post-apocalyptic type sound where we wake up one day and it's the end
of the world. It kind of reminds me of The Omega Man; the whole movie
does. If you think about Dawn of the
Dead, it falls into the horror category but it's really a
bizarre science-fiction movie. We wanted it to be creepy but if you
play the horror aspect of it, it falls flat. You have to get into the
psychology of the film and get into the psychology of the audience
members as they're watching this and play with them a little bit, to
get them to basically trust the music and then screw them over."
The score's most tonal theme is introduced early, on horns, as a
gun-toting survivor is mowed down by an ambulance, and it eventually
plays over a wide airborne special effects shot of statewide
devastation. "It's really a theme that says that we're screwed on a
global level," Bates explains. "It plays again when the survivors are
on the roof and they see a helicopter and think it's going to pick them
up. That texture is something I felt I was able to apply throughout the
movie, but it's mostly about motifs because this film doesn't end up in
the same place slasher movies tend to -- even though most of the movie
takes place in the mall I still wanted transformation to be an
undercurrent so I wanted things to continue to shift and change. As far
as the orchestra goes one of the things I wanted to play throughout was
similar to [Krzysztof] Penderecki's motifs, which oftentimes were
orchestral dissonances based on large clusters and bending strings and
woodwinds and horns, and it gives you kind of an atonal discomfort."
For the full story, check out FSM
Vol. 9, No. 3, on sale now...
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