Wednesday, March 7, 2007  4:10 pm 

Italian Horror Bathroom Suite

When I was 8, many years ago in the sleepy town of Twyford, Berkshire, there was a crappy little video shop that in hindsight would actually be some sort of cinematic heaven, but when your 8 you just want to watch The Real Ghostbusters. So this one time, when I was picking up said animated series, I crept into the Horror section just to challenge myself at taking a fleeting peak at the terrifying cover image of Stephen King’s IT. It was here that I first saw the cover of Rosemary’s Baby, shining out from all the 8O’s shadowy b-movie horror, like a slime-green emerald of forbidden rated-18 treasure.

It was the most perfect image that could sum up the movie: A pram in silhouette on top of a rocky mountain that you know by the end of the film cradles the son of Satan. Then, in putrid shades of green, Mia Farrow’s face is in profile staring upwards with a look that conveys acceptance of some sort of horrific fate.

Krzysztof Komeda - Main Title from Rosemary’s Baby

The main theme by Krzysztof Komeda perfectly echoes this feeling of helplessness that the poster evokes. Rosemary goes through the film in a constant whirl of paranoia, believing her neighbours to be Satanists that are trying to harm her baby. Obviously the truth is much more horrifying, and at the climax of the film, her newborn baby first repulses her but then she is forced as a mother to accept it for what it is. As she comes round to the gravity of her situation the film ends with aerial shots of New York, and the main title playing over the credits, a melancholy vocal that reeks of longing desperation over a malevolent minimal string piece.

From one demon-baby movie to another. This didn’t hypnotise/scare me as a single digit aged child, but it managed to creep me out in my teenage years (mainly due to the score) when it was broadcast on BBC2 past midnight.

Demon Seed was directed by Donald Cammell, who also directed one of my favourite movies ever, Performance. If you haven’t seen it, it tells the story of a super computer’s quest to further its knowledge of life by impregnating a woman who he incarcerates and terrorises in her own hi-tech home.

The super computer, Proteus IV, is represented on various screens throughout the film as psychedelic 2OO1 finale styled imagery, like the artwork of The Emperor Machine, just with a demonic edge and an obsession with spinning pyramids, sunspots and the ocean (if it was made of smoke and acid).

The score by Jerry Fielding, consists of a series of electronic bass-tones that bend and serrate in equal measures, coupled with spine-scratching treated strings. A perfect soundtrack to the doomed fate of the lead characters imprisonment and impregnation at the hands of a relentlessly devious computer.

Jerry Fielding - Birth Scene / Speaking Room / Elk Herd

This is the first track from the score, split into three parts. “Birth Scene” depicts moans from silicon-based ghosts glimpsed in mirrors and reflections. “Speaking Room” is Clockwork Orange menace with the human element replaced by deadly logical artificial intelligence. “Elk Herd” is a classic example of a horn assisted 7O’s soundtracking of business conducted in retro-futuristic white dome-shaped buildings.

labels >> Horror, Satan, Soundtrack, computers