Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s old school portmanteau horror movie Ghost Stories is currently scaring up a storm in UK cinemas and Frank Ilfman’s lavish soundtrack, orchestrated by Matthew Slater and performed by The London Metropolitan Orchestra – captures the edgy, uneasy atmosphere of the film with its violin and clarinet-driven music building to urgent, strident and often genuinely nerve-jangling climaxes familiar to those brave enough to endure the Ghost Stories cinematic experience itself.
This nicely presented and generous 40-track collection contains suites, cues and stings alongside the two pop classics that feature in the film and a few snippets of atmospheric, scene-setting dialogue. The album kicks off with Nyman as the film’s protagonist Professor Phillip Goodman intoning “We have to be so very careful what we believe in” before launching into the deceptively slow-paced, orchestral Allerton Suite, with its baroque near-romantic combination of sweeping violins and gentle piano motifs, ending with a series of ominous, juddering clatters. The longer tracks which follow swing back and forth from the urgent and strident (The Cassette and The Chase) and the delicate and ambient (The Meshuggeners, Mophead Max) with a few which unashamedly go for the jugular and are the stuff of classic horror movies (Dada, Something is Coming). Ilfman uses every trick in the horror soundtrack book with the choral stabs of Into the Woods, Woolly and the uplifting Corridor of Truth inevitably drawing comparison with Jerry Goldsmith’s score for 1976’s The Omen and the plaintive Maria’s Theme adds a dash of the thunderingly operatic just to add a touch of romantic melodrama.
Elsewhere many of the tracks – most run to around two minutes’ duration – are little more than atmospheric, ethereal mood pieces best appreciated when the film itself has been devoured a couple of times. Dialogue clips feature all the main cast – Nyman, Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther (who delivers a standout turn portraying genuine skin-crawling terror in the movie) and Martin Freeman and Anthony Newley’s Why (from the Whitehouse ‘nightwatchman’ sequence) sits with Bobby (Boris) Pickett’s cheesy ‘horror’ classic Monster Mash, which acts as the perfect pressure valve at the end of a tense and disquieting horror move experience. Ghost Stories is Ilfman’s first high profile movie soundtrack and it’s clear that he understands the name of the musical game in terms of providing a lilting, haunting and occasionally spine-tingling horror movie score. We’ll be hearing from him again for sure.
GHOST STORIES / COMPOSER: FRANK ILFMAN / RELEASED BY VARÈSE SARABANDE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
