Ich bin nicht nur großer Fan von Night Of The Living Dead (Partnerlink) sondern auch von Horrorfilmsoundtracks allgemein. Daher ist das hier auf mehreren Ebenen interessant.
Mir war bekannt, dass Romero sich für seinen Filmklassiker keinen eigenen Soundtrack leisten konnte und auf Stock-Material zurückgriff, aber mehr wusste ich bisher nicht darüber. In Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music (Partnerlink) erzählt der Regisseur selbst die Geschichte hinter seinem Score:
“When I made my first film, Night of the Living Dead, in 1968, I found myself with barely enough of a budget to complete the project, let alone hire a composer. The finished film played…mmm, pretty well, but something was missing. It needed music. Several friends of mine and myself had a small production company at the time, the Latent Image, which was surviving on beer commercials, industrial films, and the like. In order to make Night of the Living Dead, we partnered up with an audio production company, Hardman and Associates. (Karl Hardman ended up playing the despicable Harry Cooper in the film. Marilyn Eastman and Judith Ridley, both “Hardmanites,” ended up playing Helen Cooper and Judy. This was truly a homegrown production.)
As it turned out, Karl’s audio company had hundreds…I might say thousands (it seemed like thousands)…of records, vinyl discs that contained countless hours of music. None of it was specific to any film, but there were passages titled “Anticipation,” “Suspense,” “Sudden Shock.”
The composers of all this music had conjured the needs of low-budget filmmakers and had provided scores that could be bought for a fraction of what it might cost to hire a composer and / or an orchestra. Each “needle drop” cost a prescribed amount of money that was easily affordable. (The collection that Carl had in house was the Capitol Hi-Q library.)
All of a sudden, Night of the Living Dead inherited a score. Karl and I spent days, weeks, months listening to tracks. I pulled out musical candidates and would bring them back to my editing room to audition them against scenes from the film. Informed, I suppose, by Captain from Castile, Mockingbird, and The Quiet Man, I constructed a score that I believed to be not only cohesive but supportive of the film’s narrative. I like to think that I, with Karl’s help, pulled passages from those library tracks that served our film almost as well as if we had been able to hire a composer.”
Passend zum 50jährigen Jubiläum des Filmes gibt es den Soundtrack nun das erste Mal überhaupt auf Platte. Waxwork veröffentlichen ihn als Doppel-LP mit tollem Artwork. Offizieller Erscheinungstermin ist der 12. November.