Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,395
Written 3/15/97, Revised 9/1/20
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Buy it... if you don't mind the atmosphere of an extremely
understated, mellow, and underwhelming score with shrieking explosions
of terror interspersed.
Avoid it... if you consider most generic and mundane suspense
scores of muted presence to be lifeless and uninspiring, this one more
boring than offensive.
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| Young |
Hider in the House: (Christopher Young) Had this
film been made ten years later, it may very well have been nothing more
than a late-night cable television affair. With a cast boasting two
regularly supporting stars, Hider in the House is an urban
horror/thriller with a frightfully predictable plot. A man abused as a
child (played by the reliable freak, Gary Busey) has been released from
twenty years of institutionalized care after killing his parents in a
fire and decides to secretly build an apartment in the attic of a
random, huge Colonial-style home and hide there in solitude. A family
moves into the house, not knowing of the secret occupant in the attic
(which should remind everyone to check their insulation up there
regularly, just in case you have Gary Busey hanging out up there), and
slowly the man leaves hints of his existence and surprisingly saves the
family from accidents. After exposing the father of the family as an
adulterer, the stranger befriends and eventually terrorizes the mother
of the family (Mimi Rogers). It's a psycho-in-the-attic tale without
anything particularly new or refreshing about the angle on the story,
and the film's popularity sank immediately upon release. Director
Matthew Patrick had been a childhood classmate of composer Christopher
Young in Massachusetts, and with Young already establishing himself by
1990 as the master of the horror genre of film music, Patrick called
upon Young for a collaboration on Hider in the House. It was a
project right up the alley of Young, who had not only scored big name
horror scores with large, crashing ensembles, but had already extended
himself into the realm of quiet suspense as well. The film in particular
would be very similar in plot scenario and musical requirements to
Unlawful Entry, a like-minded film of slightly better success
that was scored with minimal intrusion by James Horner. Young opts for a
more authentic, orchestral presence whereas Horner went the abrasively
synthetic route. The approaches by Young and Horner towards these films
are arguably appropriate, but compared to the composers' long
filmographies and fantastic releases on album, neither one is
particularly interesting. Both scores, as a matter of fact, were
released by Intrada Records and eventually "deleted" by the label at an
incredible 99 cents per copy in the late 1990's.
Young has stated that the personality of the score for
Hider in the House attempts to mirror the emotional state of the
primary character played by Busey. The emotionally underdeveloped
persona of that character is innocent and subdued, normally stalking and
observing the situation. But, of course, that character is also prone to
explosions of temper, and Young's score therefore offers two or three
highly typical, shrieking orchestral explosions of terror to strike the
dominant near silence whenever the character goes into a rage. The rest
of
Hider in the House is very mellow and underwhelming in its
vague atmosphere. The two themes of the film, one for the concept of
family innocence and the other serving as an echo of the primary
character's troubled childhood, are transparent though simple in their
expression. The music box approach for the family is not presented with
great focus, causing it to meander aimlessly in the background of
several cues. The childhood theme is presented in the form of a boys'
choir that performs a rhythmic four-note progression that follows the
hiding psychopath's actions. The score and film both open and close with
these seemingly innocent, quasi-religious choral passages. These
performances remain consistently optimistic and pure, with the low
rumbling of the orchestra surrounding and overwhelming the theme at the
start to introduce the villain and premise of the film. The mass of the
underscore is as basic as it gets, with all of the instruments of the
small orchestral ensemble playing in their lower-most ranges to create a
wall of sound that is clearly meant to unsettle the listener. The suite
of "The Hider" is a painfully slow and unengaging summary of the
villain's material, while the other cues offer more tonal
representations for the family. Blasts of horror shatter the soundscape
in "Reversing Colors" and the choir returns for resolution in "At
Peace." Even the marginally pretty choral passages cannot save this
score from the pits of despair, however, and on album the music is
ultimately a lifeless, uninspiring effort. For a simple mood,
Hider
in the House may suffice, but musically speaking, it lacks enough of
an identity to justify a solo listen. It did, however, mark one of the
first collaborations between Young and Doug Fake of Intrada Records,
leading to the generous release of many of the composer's scores by
Intrada in the years to follow. The label re-issued the score on an
identical album in 2018 for far more than the 99-cent price appropriate
for this music.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Christopher Young reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.48
(in 27 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17
(in 10,920 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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