The Horror Film Music of Les Baxter

An Interview with Les Baxter by Randall D. Larson
Originally published in Soundtrack Magazine Vol.15 / No.58 / 1996
Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Luc Van de Ven

The death of Les Baxter on January 15, 1996, at the age of 73, closes a unique era in film scoring. A virtuoso master of low-budget scoring, Baxter worked for fifteen years in the music department of American International Pictures, scoring a variety of films from biker movies to bikini movies. But he made the greatest mark in horror films, providing inventive and effective scores for pictures with minuscule budgets - many of those films have mercifully faded from memory. But plenty of them remain classics of a kind - AIP's Poe films like THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.

The low-budget horror films produced by Roger Corman and American International Pictures in the 1950's and 60's, despite their low budgets and cheap effects, often maintained an effectiveness through moody set design, noteworthy direction, memorable performances by actors such as Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff, and through a highly effective musical scoring, more often than not penned by Les Baxter. Baxter's music, calculatingly quirky, brooding, ominous or terrifying, provided the final ingredient that gave these films life, and in some cases was the only memorable element of some of these forgotten features.

Les Baxter was born in Texas in 1922, and gained an interest in the piano at an early age. He studied at the Detroit Conservatory of Music and later at Los Angeles’ Pepperdine College before working as an arranger for famous bandleaders in the 40's, and ultimately in radio and films. Baxter's career has been as varied as the films on which he has worked. In addition to scoring movies, Baxter recorded a series of exotic and easy-listening albums for Capitol Records and arranged the recordings of many other artists. He has also written show music for theme parks and sea worlds, all of which has provided him with an arena for his penchant toward musical experimentalism. This inclination was particularly suited to science fiction and horror films, and it is with these films that Baxter's reputation is linked the strongest.

The following interview was originally conducted in 1984 and published in the third issue of my horror film fanzine CineFan. Portions also appeared in my book on horror films, Musique Fantastique. Baxter told me it was the most comprehensive interview he'd ever done. It is reprinted here in his memory - and in remembrance of some of horror film’s most terrific music.

Your first horror score was for THE BLACK SLEEP in 1956. Do you have any recollection of your approach to this first horror film, not having done that type of thing previously?

I don't specifically remember that film, although I think I did enjoy doing the score very much. But it isn't that one comes upon a film like that unprepared. A composer can write any kind of music. I was a concert composer, not just someone coming into composing fresh, and one looks forward to writing a different kind of music. One wouldn't worry about the difference any more than a legit composer would worry about whether it was a comic opera or a tragedy. You're prepared to write both.

You've said elsewhere that horror films present fewer restrictions to a composer than a drama, because of the orchestral colors available…

Or than a comedy, which is very limiting. But with a horror score, the melodies can go much farther out. You can write what would technically be called atonal music or linear music - the notes can be extremely strange. That gives you a lot of leeway, you can be as far out or as weird as you want to, musically. The orchestration and the colors have to be more unusual and that of course is a pleasure for any composer.

Can you explain the various types of range available in a horror film which, at first glance, might seem to be little other than brooding buildups and “scare” crescendos?

In the last picture that I did (THE BEAST WITHIN, 1982), I used a lot of electronic music as well as strings; but the strings, for example, don't play a straight melody as they must in a comedy or a straight dramatic film. Going back to the famous scores of Victor Young and Miklos Rozsa and so forth, you play a melody that people hear and understand, such as AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, the melody stays with you. But in a horror film the melody is much more elusive. The composer can use any notes that he wishes to without staying in the realm of something that is pretty or that is melodically restricting. Also, the sounds that you can get out of the orchestra, instead of a well-balanced orchestra where everyone has to play something that sounds good, the instruments can play where they do not usually play, and they can flutter or growl or slide and do strange things. You have a wider range at your command. Electronic instruments, also, have a limitless range of sound; you can get some unearthly sounds that you really can't get any other way.

How do you create musical terror while at the same time writing music instead of just shrill noise?

I'm glad you asked that question. It's not an easy one to answer, but a composer looks forward to the opportunity of writing a composition of some importance. Let's say the uninitiated or the inexperienced might fake it and simply shriek or whatever, but it's far better to write an important series of notes that create the same effect. I not only like to write thematic material, but new orchestral sounds to accomplish what might be done with just an easy shrieking sound. I like to tie the thing together so that the whole piece makes some sense; so the cue itself will stand as an important piece of music as well as tying in with the rest of the score. On THE BEAST WITHIN, it builds from one end of the picture to the other, and makes very logical sense when tied together. It is not repetitious in terms of repeating a theme; rather it develops and builds.

How do you go about creating tension, suspense and fear through your music?

You're asking me something that is very technical and, again, difficult to answer. How does Maurice Ravel write such sensual and lush music with the same old instruments that were used for the early symphonies? There are tricks, there are orchestral sounds that one gets to know, and after one hears them a lot one can develop on them. In other words, after you do the tried and true once, then you say, “oh, it would be nice if I added a low harp and a flute to that” or some other such combination. Then you create your own diversions, and each time you do that it gives you a new idea to create another orchestral sound.

Suspense or terror in terms of, let's say, a creature attacking is one kind of terror, and for attack usually the instruments are more active, busier, more pounding, or the tempo might be faster. For a monster not attacking, the movement would not be there; it would simply be ominous, without the pounding or movement characteristic. And for simple suspense - the animal is not lurking or attacking, he's just suspected - then the music would be quite sparse. I write much thinner than many composers do, because I think most people overwrite. They write too many things going on at once, which in turn makes something more comfortable, with all these things piled together. I think it can be much more stunning or stark with fewer parts and fewer instruments, and more frightening.

You've said that some of your scores, such as CRY OF THE BANSHEE, have passages unlike anything being used for films. Can you elaborate on this?

Well, you see I've done so many scores that sometimes I forget which music goes with which film! CRY OF THE BANSHEE came to my attention again and I put the tape on and I could not believe that I had scored a motion picture with that kind of music. It is not what anyone would normally do, but having done so many for these producers and knowing that they had faith in me meant that I could vary from one picture to the other. I wouldn't want all the movies to sound alike; if you do five horror films in a row, you don't want them all to have the same kind of music, and each of my scores is vastly different. In some cases I used percussion and voices, in others I used brass and strings or a legit orchestra, others had synthesizers. They were all very different, and for CRY OF THE BANSHEE I used strings, percussion and piano, which is not ordinary. Sometimes a person would use, let's say, woodwinds or a synthesizer, but this was strings and percussion and piano doing rhythmic attack accents, in an unusual tempo (a lot of it was 6/8) and it was somewhat in the Bartok / Stravinsky vein, although not a copy of anything that they had ever done. It would stand as a concert piece.

Was there any sort of musical continuity used in your approach to the Edgar Allan Poe films, or was each taken as a completely separate entity.

They were each vastly different but there was an overall brooding continuity between the films. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER was full orchestra and choir - I used choir to represent the ancient souls coming out of the castle, and so forth. It had a brooding-and-then-going-into-flames kind of sound. In THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM I used some stark atonal writing - which is, to simplify somewhat, one or two or three lines, say in the manner of a fugue, each playing very unmelodic and unrelated notes, one to the other, which makes for very strange music. Then, at the end of the film, I had the enormous, swinging pendulum sound done with the orchestra and the huge walls, which were supposedly heating up and gradually moving in, for which I wanted to have a massive sound of metal or stone grating on stone; I did that with the orchestra, a very slow, massive, undulating dissonance that seemed to move slowly but massively, that’s what I thought fit the scene and it was certainly different than any of the others.

THE RAVEN was greatly comic. Vincent Price does some things that are very tongue-in-cheek; he did a funny kind of side-step around the telescope on his way to see why the raven was pecking on the window, and I simply could not resist playing it cartoon style. I introduced comedy into a horror film for I think the first time, and it surprised the producers somewhat but pleased them. I did that in two films [THE RAVEN, TALES OF TERROR] and then they decided to make a complete comedy called A COMEDY OF TERRORS.

Since then, some of the best horror films have used comedy in the writing, because laughter releases the tension and it also helps the fright - I mean, to be afraid and then relieved and afraid again, it's very effective, and of course one can do that in the music. Mel Tormé called me one day and he said “I just saw BARON BLOOD and I want to tell you that the music was chilling, that was the most frightening score I've ever heard.” So you can, with music, actually frighten, regardless of the film: one thinks, well, it must be connected with something grisly happening on screen, but it is possible to frighten with the sound.

What was your approach to science fiction pictures, such as BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN and the BUCK ROGERS TV series?

In the science fiction category I'm more linear, more stark, more synthesizers, more echoplex, which is similar to tape reverb. They are mechanical, spacey sounding things. The BUCK ROGERS was somewhat tongue-in cheek and yet very spacey and fun, and I wrote futuristic melodies and did some of the effects I had done on a futuristic episode of the CLIFFHANGER series. As a matter of fact, that series also had Dracula, so I could use brooding and expressive string passages for Dracula, and then the science fiction thing for the other segment, and a third section which was a James Bondish kind of adventure had a little jazz suspense feel to it. They were all very different.

When you were called in to re-score a foreign film for American release, did you hear any part of the original music, and if so did it at all influence your approach in re-scoring the movie?

I wouldn't mind hearing the original scores because there would be no way it could influence me. A composer is influenced by everyone in history when he writes music, but I think we're able to distinguish between the two and not follow what someone else has already done. But I don't remember whether I saw these films with or without the original music.

Your music has been in so many films over the years; were all of them original scores or did you find your music sometimes re-used by the studio?

In a few cases they did. I can't say whether or not I object to that because I did so many films that it's possible I had some strong themes orchestrated in such a manner that they would fit in another film. I don't believe concert music has to conjure up exactly one picture; I think a good piece of concert music could be used for two vastly different films and tell very well what was happening. In FANTASIA, for instance, The Rite of Spring was originally written for a ballet and certainly there were no dinosaurs, yet it fit beautifully the dinosaur concept in the movie, as did the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony with the flying horses and all of that. I think that the same music could fit in many different instances.

What was your view of the rock and roll horror films you scored, such as the DR GOLDFOOT pair and THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI?

I thought they were a lot of fun. I loved doing that. I think the idea of science fiction rock is wonderful, and I think there ought to be more done in that area.

Can you describe how you used recorded frog sounds to achieve a musical effect in the movie FROGS, and how the use of the recorded sound was combined with the melodic line from the synthesizer?

It's very interesting that the year I did FROGS, the Academy was checking to be sure that all of the orchestrators and arrangers and composers who helped the major composers to write their films, got credit - which I heartily agree with. But in the case of FROGS they kept asking who orchestrated, who can we give credit to? And I said, “If you must give co-credit on the screen give it to the frogs!” Because I used actual frog sounds, slowed down, speeded up, whatever, to combine them with the synthesizer (which I played myself, so the entire score was a one-man job there was no other live human being connected with it! I simply programmed a moog synthesizer and I played the scenes as I had written them for that instrument, and then on a second track, in synchronization, I used the frog sounds, in all of the varieties that I described, to fit the scene.

BORN AGAIN was a very different picture…

It was a very difficult film to score in the sense that, as in the Vincent Price pictures, there were no castles falling apart or burning, or strange diseases, no earthquakes, no crashes, there were no shoot-em-ups. It was all within the people themselves, it was all human interest, people talking and delving into their own beliefs. Not one chase in the entire film! So it meant that the music had to be introspective, it had to deal with the inner thoughts and the beliefs of people. I wrote for large orchestra, a very heavily string score, full of themes (there are more themes in BORN AGAIN than in any other picture I've written) and lots of counter-point, very heavily developed, very Brahmsian in a sense. And the engineer at the studio, one of the best in the business, told me that it was the best score that had been recorded there, and people came out and said many flattering things about the music, for which I'm very grateful.

What is your view of current styles of scoring horror films, such as the oft-imitated synthesizer music of HALLOWEEN, the squeaks and gasps on FRIDAY THE 13TH, and so on?

In some cases, when the budget is very low or very cheap, the music is very cheap. The music is the skimpiest that can be written on the least amount of money. So the music would have to suffer as a result of that. It’s hard to make a sound on a synthesizer, if you work with it long enough, that for a moment or two is not effective; the problem with it is in being too repetitious, or not having enough imagination to have enough variety of sound. You can make an interesting sound in a film, but you can only take it so many times, and for so long. The sounds are also very naïve in many of these films; the color is its least common denominator. The people who write them have usually never heard of counterpoint, and so you get one barren sound; it reminds me of eating a vanilla ice cream cone!

In the case of another score, done by a rock group, they had the synthesizers, the electric guitars and the organ all on the same note, all cancelling each other out. They just made one fat, solid note of indistinguishable color, they put it through the phaser, which made it go in and out of highs and lows, but that was about the extent of what they did, and I found it juvenile in the extreme. Most horror scores are dreich, in contrast to a score like ALTERED STATES where the producer was wise enough to go to a Professor of music who, I've heard, had never scored a film before but who is vastly talented and imaginative, and he did one of the most varied and vividly colored, imaginative scores I've ever heard.

It's been almost ten years since you’ve scored a horror film. What brought you back to do THE BEAST WITHIN?

I either retired, or was retired by Hollywood, and took a house in Hawaii. I lived there for a time, and then I got some work in television and was flying back and forth so much that I just decided to move back and return to work. The reaction to THE BEAST WITHIN was something that had never happened at this particular studio. There were actual cheers after the cues when we recorded them, to a degree that the mixer had never heard before. I myself attended a session at this same studio, and forgive my immodesty on this, but one of the major composers was doing his score, and it was very quiet, there was no reaction, so I know the reaction I got was unusual. The orchestra themselves applauded numerous times during the recording, they came to me and said that it was one of the most unusual and best scores they had ever heard, and people all over the studio were very excited, and the producer was rather pleased, too.

It was a tremendously long score, highly developed, non-repetitious. The synthesizers would do things that sounded like the spirit souls of animals from another world moaning. There was more variety of sound from synthesizers than I think have ever been used before, combined with a big orchestra. The music is quite violent and I think interesting; I think it contributes some solid and new sounds to music. I was also asked to write six country and western songs for source-music background when they were going through the little country town, and those were uniquely country and western, they weren't studio country western. I was very fortunate to get the top country western band to do it, and our star in the film is very much a country singer and did the vocals as well as co-writing the songs with me.

Back to the score itself, one thing that most people in the audience do not realize, is that there's a world of difference between stereo music in a film and monaural. With the Academy roll-off, which takes the top and bottom off of the music [in order to be compatible with theater speaker systems], the difference in the music is just vast. I don't know how composers over a period of years have tolerated this, because the sound of the music, if it is not stereo, loses, I would say, a third of its quality. Sometimes instruments even disappear because of the roll-off.

I was just devastated when I heard the music for THE BEAST WITHIN in the monaural version after hearing it being dubbed in the studio. We re-did it in stereo and then the whole thing came back to life and all of the instruments came back in and played with their full force, and it's a vast difference. I think all pictures should eventually be on tape and the music should be in stereo. Composers spend weeks in the studio doing a score, and then it comes out in the theater on the old type of soundtrack, which is still being used, and often with a “wow” if the projector is not that good, and one wonders why he even bothered.

Finally, what's your personal view of the horror film, since you've been involved in so many of them?

I don't like the brutality; a good horror film does not necessarily have to do that. For instance, the Edgar Allan Poe films were quite remarkable; THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER was an extremely mysterious film, but there was no blood anywhere in the picture, it was all mystery. Gore for gore's sake, to me, is a poor substitute for a good story. A good ghost story can be very frightening without anything terrible happening to anyone, so I'd prefer it. I like mystery, I've always liked horror films and science fiction because they are so imaginative; science fiction particularly has delved into new thoughts, and I think anyone with any intelligence would find it fascinating, because they’re based on science and fact, and things which very possibly will happen in the future. I like the whole field, but I might add that I prefer Agatha Christie, for example, to simply dismembering people for shock value.