The Uninvited (Original Motion Picture Score)

Album Review

Here's an anomaly. The wicked-stepmother horror movie The Uninvited, directed by the Guard Brothers (that's Charlie Guard and Tom Guard), opened in late January 2009 to dismissive reviews and poor box office, suggesting it was just another cheap exploitation picture. But, as demonstrated on this album, the score, by Hollywood A-lister Christopher Young, is not the sort of Pro Tools, made-in-the-computer toss-off that might have been expected, but instead a fully realized set of cues played by an 80-piece orchestra full of first-call Hollywood musicians. True, four people are named as "synth programmers" in the credits, and periodically the music gives way to the typical sudden cataclysms of what sound like swarms of electronic insects or large pieces of machinery crashing into each other, providing the fear factors in tracks with titles like "Bloody Milk," "A Christmas Corpse," and "Terror on the Water." But much of the time, Young provides highly orchestrated string and piano themes that lift The Uninvited — as a score, anyway — out of the ranks of B horror movies and into something approaching masters like Bernard Herrmann. Maybe there was an original intention to make The Uninvited something more than it turned out to be, such that somebody decided on an unusually big budget for the music. Whatever the reason, this soundtrack is much better than the film it accompanies would seem to deserve.