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Written 4/28/10
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Buy it... if eight minutes of Christopher Young's usual dose of
harmonic suspense material of solemn beauty, this time in the form of
eerily layered female vocals, merits the exploration of the entire
score.
Avoid it... if you have difficulty appreciating Young's
accomplished horror writing despite its intelligence, because The
Uninvited is dominated by highly troubled vocal atmosphere with
smart constructs that are extremely hard to casually enjoy.
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| Young |
The Uninvited: (Christopher Young) With remakes of
Asian horror films proven fiscally viable in America in the mid-2000's,
Dreamworks bankrolled the adaptation of a 2003 Korean production called
A Tale of Two Sisters. Renamed The Uninvited, the concept
portrayed a mentally unstable young woman dealing with visions of ghosts
and delusions of plots to harm her family. Living in a creepy coastal
mansion, of course, is a prerequisite for this kind of nightmare, and
the girl struggles within that environment to untangle the relationships
between her and her sister, her dead mother, her father's fiancee who
was once her terminally ill mother's nurse, a mental institution, and
the frustrating behavior of her father. Unfortunately, the script of the
2009 remake, in the process of being toned back in terms of gore, was
forced to rely upon an overarching plot surprise that was rather shallow
and easy to deduce. The film did not live up to the namesake shared by
an American 1944 classic of the haunted house genre, grossing decently
but shrugged off by critics. The assignment for the film's score was
appropriately filled by horror and suspense veteran Christopher Young,
though topics of this nature are more often the domain of John Ottman in
the younger generation of composers. Interestingly, the resulting score
by Young has some characteristics that will remind listeners of Ottman's
style for such films (which itself is likely derived in some small way
from Young's writing), though there are choral techniques in the
finished score for The Uninvited that served as a clear precursor
to Young's massively creative Drag Me to Hell later the same
year. His music for these films is always effective, but the trick to
their appeal on album (outside of a small minority of listeners who seem
to able to derive relaxing enjoyment out of gruesome dissonance of the
most troubled nature) has always been the varying amount of harmonic
suspense music that sends chills down your spine with its solitary
beauty. Scores like Copycat and Species are best known for
such haunting allure, and Young had explored similar lines in his
overachieving music for Untraceable not long before The
Uninvited. This time around, Young limits such easily digestible
music to just a couple of cues and uses the remainder to twist the
cleverly vocalized thematic identity in those recordings into
frighteningly tormented variations. In this regard, the entirety of the
score is extremely intelligent and worthy of appreciation even if, like
the superior Drag Me to Hell, it's not an easy album to casually
enjoy. Don't play it for your roommates in the middle of the
night.
Two themes run throughout
The Uninvited, both
manipulated significantly during the score to represent the main
character's delusional behavior and warped sense of reality. Young's
most intriguing idea for the score exists in the complimentary vocal
layers of female tones for the listless, seemingly unanchored title
theme. The primary voice has an operatic quality not entirely dissimilar
to John Williams' ethereal portions of
A.I. Artificial
Intelligence, though when the second voice explores a harmonic line
above the primary one, clearly meant to enunciate the presence of the
girl's sister, the combined tone becomes eerily detached. The two
harmonic presentations of this theme open and close the album, the
latter track exploring a resolution with the two voices over solemn bass
strings that is as lovely as anything produced by Young in his career.
The short snippets of this theme interspersed especially in the latter
half of the score are a welcomed respite from the more dissonant filler
material that otherwise occupies the majority of the work. The last
track also features a chopping suspense motif with fantastic pulsating
performance emphasis from the violins. The second actual theme is
expressed by piano and is the composer's usual representation of family
living gone wrong in a sinister fashion. Heard first in "Twice Told
Tales" and ominously dying in the last seconds of the score, this theme
is Young's go-to device for shivers relating to family dysfunction. The
rest of the score is interesting in its application of two key elements:
the vocal layers and a glass harmonica. The vocals are handled with
devious attention to detail, flowing in and out of traditional sung
performances with spoken or whispered interludes as the sanity of any
given moment is questioned. The middle portions of the score are
especially deceptive in how the vocals could represent either the girl's
sister or her mother; either way, though, there is not much in terms of
pleasant atmosphere from the 20 singers throughout these passages. The
70+ orchestral players are heavy on the strings, with just a few
woodwinds and French horns to expand the soundscape. The glass harmonica
is as intoxicating as always; it's no wonder people used to think that
the instrument drove its performers mad. It is not mixed as prominently
into the final edit, however, as it could have been. Outside of this
notable accent, none of the instrumental players is afforded a
particularly prominent role. The majority of the score exists in the
treble, though a driving, seemingly electronically-enhanced rhythm on
key in "A Dance With No One" will recall some of Brian Tyler's muscular
horror ideas. Overall,
The Uninvited is a very functional genre
score with 8 to 10 minutes of compilation-worthy moments of harmonic
suspense. Given the quality of the film, Young overachieves once
again.
**** @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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