INTRADA Announces:
CUJO
Composed and Conducted by CHARLES BERNSTEIN
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 342
“People think that because you’re doing a horror movie you have to make the
score relentlessly scary for it to be effective, but that’s just not true. For the music to
be disturbing, you want to reinforce elements that are not horrific, which in
Cujo’s case was the family drama. So it was clear to me that Cujo needed to be a ‘real’ score."
-- Charles Bernstein, composer
Charles Bernstein's score to the 1983 film Cujo takes a lyrical approach, drawing on the intimacy of piano and winds or using a lush orchestra to create a sympathetic portrait of the Trenton family and their seaside town. But for all of the bucolic warmth that Bernstein’s melodies conjure, something is amiss. Bernstein links the unhappy lives of the Trentons and Cujo’s far less well-off owners, the Cambers. Percussion often echoes without resolve, adding to the melancholy that hangs over Cujo well before its terror begins.
Cujo helped make Charles Bernstein one of Hollywood’s most striking names for musical terror during the ’80s. He moved from the orchestra to create a distinctively chilling synthesizer sound for A Nightmare Elm Street and a mix of orchestra and electronics in April Fool’s Day and Deadly Friend. But among his genre scores, Cujo remains a breed apart for its emphasis on the human condition above all.
This premiere presentation of the score on CD includes the cues as Bernstein originally composed and recorded them, in their two-track stereo mixes made by Robert Fernandez at The Burbank Studios in May 1983.
In the film under direction of Lewis Teague, Dee Wallace plays a woman who unleashes her maternal fury defending the life of her six-year-old, Tad (Danny Pintauro) while held prisoner in a car by a rabid St. Bernard.
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 342
Retail Price: $19.99
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For track listing and sound samples, please visit:
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.10043/.f