Meanwhile, synthesizers were rapidly finding a place in rock music. San-Francisco-based musicians Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 to demonstrate the Moog and soon found themselves in demand for studio session work, leading to a recording contract with Warner Brothers and a commission to provide electronic music for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s psychedelic masterpiece Performance (1970). During the production of Performance, Mick Jagger recorded a Moog score for Kenneth Anger’s 11-minute short Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969); the giant Moog synthesizer seen in the Roeg/Cammell film is the one he used.
Mick Jagger (and Moog) in this rare promo film for Performance:
Keith Emerson of prog-rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer was another early customer; his personal feedback and consultation helped Roberg Moog to refine the instrument and probably paved the way for the Minimoog, a monophonic three-oscillator keyboard synthesizer launched in 1970. Portable and relatively affordable, it was popular with touring rock bands and soon found its way into recording studios used by film composers, thus becoming one of the first synths to feature on low-budget movie scores.
A synth highlight from Keith Emerson’s score for Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980):
Prominent among the ‘early adopters to make a mark on the genre in the 1970s was Phillan Bishop, whose bleep-and-bloop approach lent avant-garde menace to Thomas Alderman’s The Severed Arm, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil and Chris Munger’s Kiss of the Tarantula.
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The Severed Arm, featuring music by Phillan Bishop
Carl Zittrer also deserves a mention; he went free-form crazy on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and then cohered a little for the superior Deathdream, both for director Bob Clark.
By now a pattern was beginning to emerge; synthesizers signified madness, extreme situations, encroaching terror, and the chilly derangement of the psychopath. All of these elements come together in the score to The Last House on the Left, an assortment of country bluegrass tunes augmented by crude but effective electronics (from a Moog and an ARP 2600), played by Steve Chapin and the film’s lead psycho, musician-turned-actor David Hess.
In 1973, Robert Moog associate David Borden was commissioned to record the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s soon-to-be smash The Exorcist. As it turned out, only a minute of his work was used, with Friedkin instead making the inspired if the seemingly unlikely choice of Mike Oldfield’s progressive rock epic “Tubular Bells”.
The enormous success of The Exorcist, and the impact of “Tubular Bells”, echoed through the film scores of the 1970s, and with synthesizers now part of the furniture in many a recording studio and film post-production suite, an explosion of electronic sound pulsated through the horror genre.
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In fact, not only Mike Oldfield but progressive rock as a whole was a driving force in pushing synthesizers to the forefront of 1970s film composition; bands like Yes, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer deployed electric organs, Minimoogs and towering stacks of ARP and Buchla technology, and this would inspire an Italian band which was to become one of the foremost exponents of electronics in film scoring: Goblin.
Goblin lent innovative jazz-rock stylings to Dario Argento’s brutal, beautiful Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1975), but really hit the musical motherlode on their second Argento collaboration, Suspiria (1977), a tumultuous score built around a circling melody that drags “Tubular Bells” into a cackling synthesized whirlwind.
Their exciting, arpeggiator-driven scores for Luigi Cozzi’s grisly but loveable alien invasion flick Contamination and Joe D’Amato’s sleazy gross-out Beyond the Darkness considerably enhance the films, while the influence of disco (more on that later) supercharges their contribution to Argento’s masterpiece Tenebrae (only three members of Goblin play on this recording, hence the film’s ‘bit-of-a-mouthful’ credit to “Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli”).
The advent of ever more affordable synthesizers locked step with the rise of the slasher movie, and the two proved a match made in low-budget heaven. In 1978, John Carpenter was putting the finishing touches to his third feature, Halloween.
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There was no way he could afford an orchestral score, but he was a dab hand with a synth – as his previous film Assault on Precinct 13 had shown – so he elected to write and perform the music himself.
The result helped a simple slasher film to become one of the biggest independent hits of the 1970s. For the main theme, Carpenter employed an insistent metronomic pulse, but with a twist; the piano taps out five beats to the bar (shades of prog-rock again). Meanwhile, the synthesizer provides a rapid ‘ticker-ticker-ticker-ticker’ in the background, creating a jittery sense of things moving at the periphery of your attention, perfectly in keeping with Carpenter’s menacing widescreen framing.
The template set by Halloween would sustain many of Carpenter’s future films, The Fog being an especially wonderful example.
It would inspire a new generation of soundtrack composers; in particular, Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, whose breathtakingly inventive score for Phantasm (1978) drew on avant-garde electronics, progressive rock, Carpenter-style repetition, and even disco (an influential musical form when it comes to movie soundtracks, and one whose leading lights embraced the synthesizer wholeheartedly).
Tim Krog’s score for another surprise low-budget horror hit, Ulli Lommel’s The Boogey Man (1980), also deserves mention for its lush melancholic synth arrangements.
Videodrome (1983) saw Canadian director David Cronenberg’s resident composer, Howard Shore, using a new computer instrument called the Synclavier to blur the line between synthetic orchestrations and a real string section. The resulting ambiguity mirrored the film’s unsettling philosophical core: were the characters having real experiences or hallucinations; were the instruments real, or artificial?
As the 1980s got underway, the sampler emerged as the big new concept in musical composition, and the post-modern fallout of sampling has persisted ever since. One could argue that synthesizers were historicised by the advent of sampling, and it’s difficult now to escape a sense of nostalgia or deliberate quotation of the past when using the classic Moogs or ARPs on record.
However, as more recent films such as Under the Skin (2014) have shown, electronic sound synthesis, whether based in sampling and software manipulation or ‘traditional’ synthesizer programming, continues to offer creative support to the extreme visions of horror and fantasy filmmakers.
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