Something Wicked This Way Comes - Expanded

Intrada presents an updated and expanded edition of James Horner's score to the 1983 Walt Disney film Something Wicked This Way Comes. Until Intrada's initial release back in 2009, the score was a holy grail among collectors. That presentation was based on an earlier (yet unreleased) album program Horner had prepared back at the time of the film's release. Now some 15 years later, Intrada has revisited the score, placing it largely in film order and adding a few previously unreleased score tracks in addition to a suite of source music heard throughout the film.

The score opens on a malevolent note as images of a jet-black train traveling in deep night traverse the screen. As the credits conclude, the blackness and menacing atmosphere dissolve into an autumn pastoral - a lengthy sequence featuring a gorgeous theme colored in youth, innocence and fall hues, yet tinged with melancholy as the adult narrator reflects on his small town and a long-ago experience. It's nostalgia captured in music and is one of the many highlights of this powerful work.The score gets darker as the evil doings of the carnival unfold, and Horner's use of wordless female choir throughout gives an ethereal, supernatural, and downright sinister atmosphere to the events.

The film is a dark journey into evil. Darkness descends as flyers promoting the carnival are tossed about in the small town, then amps up with the arrival of the carnival itself: Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival - a singular dark carnival that hears the pain within the townsfolk's hearts. The carnival grants wishes and rectifies disappointment, but not without extracting a steep price. Teens Will Halloway and his kindred spirit Jim Nightshade hear the arriving train in the middle of the night, and their natural curiosity leads them to discover the dark secrets within. Shortly thereafter, townsfolk begin to disappear. When Dark realizes the boys have learned too much and threaten his agenda, he begins a terrifying boyhunt that leads to a tense confrontation between Dark and Will's father, Charles, and a final yet poetic, showdown in the carnival itself.