Danny Elfman The Frighteners (1996)
Danny Elfman was forty-three years old when The Frighteners opened, twelve years into the most consequential composer-director partnership of the 1980s and 1990s (his collaboration with Tim Burton), and seven years past the breakthrough Batman score (1989) that had made him the most-imitated film composer in Hollywood. His Frighteners score is the bridge between his comic-gothic register — Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) — and the more serious horror register he would refine on Sleepy Hollow (1999) three years later.
From Oingo Boingo to Tim Burton
Elfman was born in 1953 in Los Angeles, traveled with a French theatrical troupe in his late teens, and led the Los Angeles ska-rock band Oingo Boingo through the late 1970s and 1980s. Tim Burton hired him to score Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985); the score was Elfman's first and a near-perfect calling card. The Burton partnership has produced more than fifteen films since.
"I have known how Danny scores a film since 1985, and I still cannot predict what he will do on any given cue. He is the only composer who can write a theme that is at once funny, sad, sinister, and danceable. That is the entire register Beetlejuice was after." — Tim Burton, Cinephilia & Beyond (2018)
By 1996 Elfman had scored Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mission: Impossible, Dolores Claiborne, Dead Presidents, and dozens of others. He was one of the three or four most in-demand composers in Hollywood.
The tonal brief on The Frighteners
Peter Jackson's brief to Elfman was a tonal one: the score had to bridge the comedy and horror registers without resolving them. The first thirty minutes of the film — the staged hauntings, the ghost crew's bickering, the Lynskey house levitationb6 b7 — get cheerful Beetlejuice-adjacent cues. The Reaper sequences get harmonic-minor gothic with descending celesta lines. The freezer sceneb25 gets a sustained tonal cluster that holds until Frank's spirit leaves his body.
The chapel climaxb37b is the score's biggest moment: a forty-piece orchestra, a wordless choir, and the same "demonic worm-mouth" cue that Elfman would refine three years later for the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow.
"The Frighteners is the dry run for Sleepy Hollow. Elfman is still working out how to make a horror score that is also a comic score. By 1999 he had it. By 1996 he was almost there." — Christian Clemmensen, Filmtracks (1996)
After The Frighteners
Elfman has continued to be the most prolific composer in Hollywood. His credits since 1996 include Mars Attacks! (1996), Men in Black (1997), Good Will Hunting (1997), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Spider-Man (2002), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Big Fish (2003), Milk (2008), and the Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) score. He has been nominated for four Academy Awards and has scored more than 100 feature films.
The Frighteners score remains underrated within his filmography — partly because the film itself was a commercial disappointment, partly because the score's tonal-bridge function is harder to appreciate in isolation than the unified registers of Beetlejuice or Sleepy Hollow. The director's-cut Blu-ray restored several Elfman cues that had been trimmed for the theatrical release.
"Elfman's Frighteners score is the secret track in his discography. It's the bridge between his eighties self and his nineties self. Anyone serious about Elfman has to listen to this score twice." — Tim Greiving, Variety (2018)