What Lies Beneath (Apparences)

You can usually expect good results when Alan Silvestri is paired with director Robert Zemekis, a partnership that started with a bang on Back to the Future and hasn't looked back since. For his thriller/murder mystery/psychological horror, Zemekis apparently wanted to produce something Hitchcockian and this evidently stretched to the score. Having said that, it's not quite as Herrmann-esque as I expected it to be, but there are sections which do recall Vertigo and Psycho.

The Main Title starts off reasonably promising with an Alien style ticking motif, a low string theme and higher string trills in counterpoint. From this point, things become a little more low key. Fairly long sections do seem to drift a little, suspense building in fairly predictable ways, although I must confess that a couple of the louder brass outbursts did make me flinch - not something I can say very often about music on its own. The music is fairly manipulative, but this is usually the case for horror music and the film itself very much manipulates the audience. The score does require more than one listen to actually discover all of Silvestri's little ideas and melodic fragments, even if they aren't actually developed very much. Only during The Getaway do things really burst into life where Silvestri combines Psycho strings with brass. This does bring to mind one clever person's suggestion for Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho - that Danny Elfman tried adding brass to Herrmann's original strings only orchestra. An interesting idea and based on Silvestri's imitation here, one that might have worked quite well in skilled hands. While the string motifs may be pure Herrmann, the brass is pure Silvestri and the two combine better than might be expected.

Reunited uses some crushing Herrmann-esque brass, before rounding without with the obligatory glimmer of hope for the final and leaves a decided chill in the air. The End Credits are a well presented collection of the more interesting parts of the score and form the most interesting sustained music of the album. Overall, What Lies Beneath is a fairly creepy score and Silvestri does actually sustain the misty, chilling atmosphere well, even if it doesn't always make for riveting listening. The first listening to this album was actually quite a creepy experience and the outbursts did surprise me, but further listens do reveal Silvestri's music to be fairly admirably constructed. A difficult album to recommend since it is often so slow, but creepy the effect can be a little soporiphic and the more interesting ideas lean too heavily on Herrmann. Almost certainly perfect in the film, but not a terribly interesting album.