Re-Animator

Intrada's first release of Richard Band's score to Re-Animator sold out in just over 24 hours. Given the film's cult status and general affection for Band's quirky and fun score, Intrada is re-issuing Re-Animator to make it available to fans of the film and Richard Band alike. Ever so slightly remastered from the previous issue, it features Band's complete score in chronological order. Originally sourced from the composers ½" three-track masters, this album presents the score in crisp, detailed stereo sound. minus the suite from Ghoulies that was featured on the prior limited edition.

In the quirky adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft' Re-Animator, Jeffrey Combs plays Herbert West, a scientist who has discovered a fluid which brings dead tissue back to life. He involves fellow student Dan Cain and his fiancée Megan Halsey in his research by experimenting on their dead cat. Dan, fascinated by West's research, agrees to smuggle him into the hospital morgue. Things don't go exactly as planned, unleashing one of the most outrageously gory and entertaining horror films, complete with a sexually depraved talking head. Directed by Stuart Gordon, a particular fan of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score, he asked Band to convey a similarly driving and suspenseful approach. Band came back with Re-Animator's notorious main theme, which satirically spun Psycho's famed strings into a disco-jazz beat, all before segueing into Band's own original theme. Band spent thousands of dollars from his own pocket to ensure a quality recording with the Rome Philharmonic, whose players went overtime as they tried to grasp the jazz rhythms of Band's score. Another musical in-joke is Band's twisted lullaby theme for West ("The Cat Experiment: Searching for the Body in the Morgue"). "When you're talking about true psychosis, you always reference the father of psychology himself," Band says. "So I inverted the theme of Jerry Goldsmith's Freud." Skillfully combining electronics with alternately satiric and dark orchestral motifs, Band would turn a violin into the slithering meows of the zombified pet Rufus ("Where's the Cat?: The Cellar"), the discombobulated interplay between headless body and talking head ("Body and Soul"), and West's Mephistophelean effect on a very reluctant Cain in "Halsey's Back." Yet for all of the score's satiric relentlessness, Band also conjures a beautifully tender love theme for Cain and his disapproving fiancée Meg (Barbara Crampton).