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It begins with the Star Spangled Banner playing loud and proud as if we were about to watch a baseball game, but no it's just some channel's late night programming coming to a close, and as it abruptly becomes white noise, the score transfers into an eerie melody with a small, almost un- noticeable hint of fantasy before it becomes a calm, bittersweat tune that transcends into an upbeat spasm that, like the rest of the score, makes for quite an enjoyable listen. |
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You could call Jerry Goldsmith's Poltergeist score a "musical description of the film." Like the film itself, it is a brilliant mixture of "eerie", "fantasy", and "wonder", three words that you'll probably see a lot in this article. There are musical hints throughout the earlier scenes of the movie that this is all too good to be true and that really there is something wicked is lurking about. And it isn't too long before it shows itself. The score switches out the "calm and bittersweat" melodies for a "calm, but twisted" approach. As the film starts to play with childhood fears, like clowns and scary looking trees, the score starts to play with those fears, letting us know that there is a reason to fear those things that often turn out to be nothing at all. During the abduction scene, we are given an exciting, loud, and suspensful peice. In the second act, the fantasy element is taken up a notch until it's reaches a high point during the rescue scene. After that, the it is given a more twisted than ever character trait, as much of the "wonder" is replaced with harsh, loud, suspensful cues, which eventually drown out, letting us know that the whole ordeal is over as we are once again treated to Carol Anne's theme, this time with childrens' voices humming along. |
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In an interview with Cinema Score, Jerry Goldsmith spoke about how he got the job. "Steven Spielberg called me about five months before it went into production and wanted to know if I would be interested in doing it. He’d long been an admirer of mine, and we had met several times. I said I’d be very interested, so he sent me a script and I loved it. I was very excited about being involved with anything with Spielberg, anyway. " Jerry Goldsmith would work closely with Spielberg during the creation of the score."With Spielberg, probably more than any other director, there’s a tremendous amount of discussion. He’s very articulate about music, and one can discuss for hours about approaches. Anything I did was not on my own volition; it was a joint effort in that we both agreed what we were try- ing to do with the music for the picture. We wanted a childlike theme for the little girl; Spielberg felt that much of the action in the closet should have a quasi-religious atmosphere to it. There was something defi- nitely non-human about it, yet it was not evil all the way. It was disc- ussing specifics like that which resulted in our approach. " Because of all the effects in the film, Spielberg had give Goldsmith an extremely vivid description of what the audience was going to be seeing, but it wasn't until the score was finished that much of the effects footage started rolling in. In some cases, the cues were actually longer than the scene was. Goldsmith spoke of one scene in particular: "The sequence where the Victorian ghost comes down the stairs was originally blocked to be twice as long. If you hear the album and see the picture you’ll see where it had to be cut for the picture. When the effects came in, there were only half as much of them." |
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Arthur Morton worked as the orchestrator of the score. Morton once descri- bed their collaborations in a simple manor, “I take the music from the yellow paper and put it on the white paper." Goldsmith and Morton had been working together since Take Her She's Mine and would do so until LA Conf- idential, a score he went uncredited on. Athur Morton passed away in 2000. |
