Invasion of Body Snatchers

Music by Denny Zeitlin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the greatest horror films of modern cinema, Invasion of Body Snatchers (1978) directed by Phillip Kaufman is more a sequence of Don Siegel´s Invasion of Body Snatchers (1956), than exactly a remake.

Avoiding the political implications of the original (the McCarth era), Kaufman focus on human drama. The nullification of individuality and the massification of thoughts and behavior was a theme that gave great movies in the fantastic genre and Invasion of Body Snatchers is certainly one of the best. The film also has some injokes, like cast Leonard Nimoy as a psychologist possibly already replaced by an alien.

Denny Zeitlin, friend of director Kaufman since student days, was a very natural choice because the composer was also graduated in psychiatry and it was the ideal talent to incrase the emotional imbalance request by the film. Zeitlin in subliminal ways disorients conventional lines of sound perception. The opening theme, for example, part of familiar music for suspense and then expands its action to a sound territory really alien.

 

“Phil wanted my music to convey the menace of an infiltrated alien life form”. 

 

The combination of orchestral and electronic forces and even tricks of recording and mixing, creating the sound environment that places the composer among the most creative of film music. The psychological and physical fear that Kaufman explores so well in the film, had its brilliant match in horror musical landscape created by Zeitlin. The inhuman breath of Escape To Darkness, the spatial disorientation of different motifs (jazz and soul) merged to electronic textures in On the Streets, the dissonances of Angel of Death or the summing of sound forces in The Reckoning, are moments of genius unparalleled. An edition remarkable as one of the most important cult rescues of recent years. The edition of label Perseverance also includes a nice interview with the composer.