The Amityville Horror (1979) - Soundtrack Collection

Even though I had been gravitating towards entertainments of the scary and spooky kind for as long as I could remember, it was more of an instinctual thing than a conscious act or decision on my part. Until 1979, that is. That was the year I turned twelve. It would also be the year when something unlocked and opened a door somewhere deep inside my brain. 

As I have shared elsewhere on this blog, 1979 is when I began to pay closer attention and started to contextualize all this weird, monstrous, and macabre stuff that fascinated me so. The year I became a fan of William Goldman, of Stephen King, of John Carpenter.

But what, if anything, does that have to do with The Amityville Horror? Nothing... and yet everything.

1979, for me, was when I began to transition out of childhood and into adolescence. When I began to question and study things with something akin to a critical eye, but an eye that was still suffused with a child's sense of wonder and its mercurial perceptions of art and reality. When the real and the unreal could still mingle and combine in a way that seemed to be, well, really real.

Nowadays that mingling can only be embodied and replicated in the books I read, the movies I watch, and music I listen to, but not in the way that I perceive reality. That door has closed.

Which brings me, albeit in the most circuitous of ways, to The Amityville Horror. This "true story" was quite the cultural phenomenon in 1979. A phenomenon that would itself transition into an exploitation cottage industry of ever more lurid and ludicrous books and movies and documentaries and mythical-god knows what else.

But in 1979 I thought it was real. While I did not see the film itself until 1980, or so. The word of mouth I heard around school was that the movie was nothing like the book and not all that scary. Nonetheless I did buy the soundtrack, despite my having not seen the picture, and enjoyed some of what I heard.

Like every other soundtrack album at that time, the music was a re-recording of select portions of the score. It also contained a disco version of the main title that, I will admit without any embarrassment or shame, got me dancing around my bedroom. There was also a jazz selection, titled Juke Box, that, while I liked it, I did not recognize it. Also included on the album was an aggressive (as described in Jeff Bond's liner notes for this release) arrangement of Bach's Concerto No. 5 for Harpsichord and Strings that composer Lalo Schifrin created for use in the film.

As much as I liked what little of the score there was on the album, and as much as it helped me acquire an appreciation for the use of human voices in film scores, I felt there was room for improvement. Something that did not happen until Quartet Records released this expanded edition of Schifrin's complete score in 2015. A delightful upgrade from the lackluster re-recording that Schifrin's own label had released. A re-recording which changed the tempo and timbre into something that sounded like an off-brand knock-off of his Oscar-nominated score.

While my feelings about the movie, its source material, and their questionable legacy remain ambivalent. There is one thing I have no doubt about, at all. Lalo Schifrin's score for The Amityville Horror is far more impressive and chilling than the film itself was ever capable of being.