In honor of Halloween, for my first Throwback Thursday, I'll be resurrecting a blog entry that I wrote back in 2010 and never posted. Once again, I'm a couple of minutes late, because I was trying way too hard to think of a bad vampire pun to add here, but it ended up being too much of a pain in the neck.
I think people never realize the value of a good soundtrack until they've sat through a movie with a bad one.
Seriously, think about it. In the best cases, we're not always consciously aware of the music playing under a film because it blends so well with the story itself. It helps to heighten our emotional reactions without sticking out like a sore thumb. It's only when a movie has a less than great soundtrack that you can't help but notice it. There you are, trying to get invested in the story, but there's all of this awkward noise getting in the way.
It's difficult for me to find stuff to watch around Halloween because I don't do well with really scary horror flicks. This Halloween, though, I had the brilliant idea to watch a couple of classic silent horror films. What made it better was that my brother was in town, and I knew he'd be on board. On Halloween night, we settled on Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. It started as a great plan, but the mistake I made was choosing to watch the version of Nosferatu that was available to stream on Netflix rather than ordering the DVD version ahead of time. Well, how could I have known? Being generally unfamiliar with the ways of silent films, I just assumed that all of the versions would be basically the same, or at least have the same music. How very wrong I was.
If you, like me, were not aware, silent films back in the day almost always featured a live orchestra. I mean, now that I know, it seems incredibly obvious and I'm not sure why I didn't figure that out in the first place, but whatever. I didn't. I have since learned that there are multiple versions of Nosferatu in existence, each with a different score. One of them, (the one I meant to watch), has a soundtrack replicating the music that would have accompanied the movie when it was originally in cinemas. Another version features a gothic industrial soundtrack, and I've heard fairly good things about that one as well.
And yet, out of all of the cool versions floating around out there, the one Nick and I got stuck with was the one with music sounding like it was played on a Casio keyboard from the 1980s, and some weird filter that made all of the scenes different colors, meant to enhance the intended emotion of each scene, or something like that. The actual result was that this iconic film, this self-proclaimed "Symphony of Horror" that was supposed to have terrified audiences when it premiered, was instead kind of a joke. Nick and I couldn't take it seriously, and I caught myself starting to fall asleep more than once. And all because the music took so much away from what should have been a legendary fright-fest.
Moral of the story is, if you plan on watching a silent film, make sure it's the version with the correct soundtrack.
UPDATE (10/30/2014): This Halloween, Netflix was streaming the version of Nosferatu with the original score. I gave it another watch, and I'm pleased to report that it's much more effective with an actual orchestra behind it. I was surprised to discover that this version still had the color filter, but it was somehow less jarring without the stupid Casio score. Also, I didn't fall asleep this time, so I got to see a few scenes I'd missed upon first viewing, and they turned out to be some of the scariest ones in the entire movie, which would partially explain why I was so underwhelmed the first time around. Granted, it's possible that Nosferatu may still not be considered terrifying by the standards of today's horror fanatics, but that's perfectly fine with me because I hate horror movies anyway and probably couldn't watch it if it were really that bad. It was still delightfully creepy, and I'm thrilled that I finally got to see it the way it was meant to be seen.
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