As today really is Friday the 13th, we felt it only appropriate to commemorate the day in style. And 
what better way to spotlight soundtracks and film scores on such a day than to have a sit-down discussion with the man who gave the Friday the 13th movie series its blood-splattering, iconic music?
Read on, as we spend some time chatting with Mr. Harry Manfredini, a man, as you will quickly learn, has many, many tricks up his sleeve!
You are considered, along the likes of John Carpenter and Bernard Herrmann, one of the pioneering artists in horror film composition. How does such an accolade affect a creative person like yourself?
Well, it’s certainly an honor, and something I really enjoy. I’m not sure if John really thinks of himself as a great composer, but he certainly was able to create something of lasting value. But he’s probably a much better director than I am. John’s a very talented director. So there’s a very good upside to it, but of course there is an obvious downside, as well.
A lot of people tend to think that’s all I do. I think that’s where I get piled in with John Carpenter, because John basically does that and does it well. John doesn’t really write other music, whereas in fact, I do comedies and dramas for TV…I’ve done jingles and all sorts of things, some of which have also become quite popular. I really don’t limit myself strictly to the horror genre and Friday the 13th. Saying that I do Friday the 13th is like saying that Chef Boyardee does SpaghettiO’s, or saying that John Carpenter does Halloween. He’s a director, and I’m a composer.
I was wondering about how that stigma has affected your creativity or consideration for various projects, 
because you are so embedded in the Friday the 13th mythos.
Like I said, it’s a double-edged sword. I mean, if someone is doing a horror movie and comes to me
asking if I’ll do the score, I’ll think it’s great. However, I will tend to shy away from doing a lot of horror films, simply because they are “just horror films,” just as I’ll stay away from masked killer movies. However, if there does end up being another Friday the 13th movie, which we now know there will be, I would be more than happy to score it.
That said, when I do get offered a film that isn’t horror, I jump on it. I do Lifetime films, where I make people cry, and like I said, I also do comedies. But regardless, each genre of film takes on certain familiar characteristics that are expected of the genre, so sometimes you really can’t get away from it. You’ve got characters, you’ve got what the director wants, and you’ve got to manipulate the audience – there are all sorts of things you just have to do. It’s all in how the elements blend together. Sometimes it comes out Friday the 13th, and sometimes it comes out The Anna Nicole Smith Story.
Since the genre of film scores is a serious collector’s market, does it bother you at all that a lot of your work is not commercially available for the public to enjoy? To my knowledge, the vast majority of your catalogue was released on vinyl and never on CD.
Actually, if you go to HarryManfredini.com, I have about 14 different CDs currently available. And a lot of those vinyl releases, I have personally upgraded to CD. And others that were never available at all, I’ve made CDs out of some of those. Given the fact that they are CDRs, that’s all I can do. If something is out-of-print, its out-of-print, and you can’t really do anything about it. But if you go the site, I’ve got DeepStar Six, House I & II, Swamp Thing, Wishmaster, and I’m working on a compilation of Friday the 13th Parts I-VI. Hopefully, I’ll have that ready by the end of the year. It’s my own project, and I’ve run into a few problems, like the original masters being lost, so it’s been really hard to reassemble.
But yeah, go to my website or Dark Delicacies, which is a web-store that distributes my albums, and 
you can find a lot of good stuff there, and it’s not just horror. I’ve also got two CDs on there called Music from the Couch, which are composed of a bunch of television excerpts from shows and commercials that you probably heard while sitting on the couch, but you didn’t know they were done by me. I’m also working on a third part to that series, too.
What I found really cool when researching your music is that you have managed to evolve as a musician over the years, while never losing sight of each project.
Well yeah, I do feel like I evolve with every project I undertake. I actually started out as a musician, playing saxophone. So I do have a wide range of experience. I studied music for a very long time, so I am well aware of different techniques. I also try to develop a sound that becomes specific to each film to give it a bit of individuality.
For example, I did a film called Hidden Agenda, which is a thriller about a guy who goes to Germany to investigate his brother’s murder. He is represented by a jazz flugelhorn, and there is a German girl who is represented by three bars that I kinda stole from the German composer Hindemith. And what happens is that both pieces worked together. Again, I try to create something that is special to each film that I do.
And if you think about House and House II, I had a baby pterodactyl, a worm-dog, an old cowboy…I had all sorts of crazy things for which I had to create music. It was like a live-action cartoon. Every time you open a door, there was something completely off the wall, be it prehistoric, cowboys, or Slim the skeleton. I think one of the things that probably sets me apart from other composers is that when I have to create a theme for a character, I will create a formula – some kind of orchestral color.
I try to create a sound as opposed to a traditional theme. Like the baby pterodactyl was a combination of a grammar school recorder and a bassoon, and Slim was a bass harmonica. In House I, there was a 
really cool scene when William Katt goes into the thing called The Void and gets attacked by the dingbat; I actually created a screechy sound for the dingbat.
And in another movie I recently did called Dead and Gone, I took a Burger King toy that laughs when you shake it. And if you sample it and play it back very slowly, it sounds like an eerie moan, and in the movie it represents a haunted cabin.
So, with all of the technological advancements that emerge every year, when looking back, did you feel that you were limited at all when doing something like the original Friday the 13th?
If I have to say anything about horror films, it is the fact that they are un-limiting. You are really free to do whatever you want and be creative within anything you can think of. Harmonically, you are totally open, instrumentally, whatever! I mean, the “ch-ch-ch-ch” sound is actually me! But yeah, with the original Friday the 13th, they say that necessity is the mother of invention. There was no money and no time to do the score, so I really had to come up with all kinds of things on my own.
I was using instruments that people laugh about now. I borrowed an instrument from a rock musician friend of mine called an Orchestron, which had a record player hooked up to a keyboard. And instead of playing music, the records had sound files on them, like an optical film track, and if you pressed a certain key, it would play the record at a given speed. It was really like a Rube Goldberg machine! It was hysterical. I also used an Irish tin whistle. I would open up a piano and scrape the strings with a quarter. Again, that’s the fun thing about horror films; you are free to do whatever you can imagine.
So, when the producers approached you to do Friday the 13th, was there any pressure to replicate the values of Halloween, given its enormous success?
No, not at all. In fact, I hadn’t even seen Halloween by that point. I had actually done two children’s films for Sean Cunningham prior to that; one was Here Come the Tigers, which was like The Bad News 
Bears, and the other one was Manny’s Orphans, which was also like The Bad News Bears but with a soccer team. I had liked doing those, because they were light and simple. And I remember one day, we were sitting in his kitchen, and he told me, “I’m going to make this move called Friday the 13th, and it’s going to be the scariest movie ever made. And you’re going to do the score!” And I went, “okay, fine.”
I had no problems with it; I mean, he was the guy making movies, and I was the guy doing scores, and off we went! There was no pressure whatsoever. Every film I’ve done with Sean was like, “you write what you write, and we’ll deal with it.” And if there was something he wanted to change, we’d change it. He pretty much just lets me go for it.
And then, in order to keep a linear familiarity with the series, he kept you on to do a number of the sequels. Did you see that as a personal challenge to retain that familiarity while growing artistically?
Well, sure. Since there was usually one or two years between sequels, technology advanced quite a bit, what with new synthesizers, samplers, and other equipment, so I really tried to stay on top of that. And secondly, the stories changed. As the series went on, they got more exotic, while still having Jason running around killing everyone. Part III was in 3-D, Part VI was very esoteric, and Part V didn't even have Jason in it at all.
I actually had a difficult time with that one, because I knew the killer wasn’t Jason as I was scoring it, so I tended to over-score scenes to bring a bit more believability to the Jason character, who, as you know, turned out to be the ambulance driver. So, I’m always aware of the story, and sometimes I learn a new trick or a new lick through improvisation. But obviously, I tried to keep the basic harmonic elements intact.
The early 1980s was a time when heavy-synthesizer music and the New Wave scene came into prevalence in the mainstream. But when it came time to do Friday the 13th Part III, you took a couple steps backwards and gave it a disco edge. How did you come to make that decision?
It was all part of the fun, really. Part III was in 3-D, and there hadn’t been a 3-D movie made in a really long time, so we wanted to give it a fun edge that was completely out of left field. I went over to Michael Zager’s place (he was a well-known person in the disco era), and told him that I wanted to put 
something together with him that blended disco with horror. I showed him the chords, melodies, and sounds that went into Friday the 13th, and I told him he can live with them for a week and that when I came back, I wanted him to make a disco song out of it. So, I came back a week later, and we sat down together, and before we knew it, we had a Disco Jason!
So what happened that you ended up missing out on Part VIII?
I actually missed Part VII, too. For Part VII, they gleaned material from Parts I-VI. But at the time, I was involved with DeepStar Six, which was a lot of work – we had a huge orchestra for it. I don’t normally like to do two films at the same time. And they were filming Part VII in Canada, as was VIII. And at the time, there was this huge thing called Canadian Content, where if you used a certain amount of primary cast and crew who were Canadian, you got a huge tax rebate, and you saved a lot of money. So, they ended up using Fred Mollin for the composition, but I came back for IX (Jason Goes to Hell) and Jason X.
Were you even approached to be involved with the remake?
I think a lot of fans were asking for me, and I definitely would have done it if someone had asked me. But I think that the powers-that-be felt that it was going to be a whole new Jason. They didn’t even use Kane [Hodder] or the guy from Freddy vs. Jason [Ken Kirzinger]. They used somebody else completely, and they also went with a different composer [Brian Tyler].
Now, I haven’t seen the movie, nor do I know what the music sounds like. I was getting phone calls like crazy when it came out from people saying, “this is all screwed up,” “this doesn’t make any sense,” “Jason doesn’t run,” and whatever else bothered them. And they didn’t seem to like the music at all – at least the hardcore fans. I know there is a big push from a lot of fans to have me back for the new one next year. Like I said, I’d be more than happy to do it. I would have also been happy to do that last one, too! But those are things that are not in my control.
So what can you tell me about your experience on The Horror Show (AKA House III)? That seems to be a movie that got pushed under the rug.
That was a very strange situation. United Artists had changed the script around so many times. One of the problems Sean was having with the whole “House” thing, was that the first one was kinda cool, where a guy goes to a haunted house, has Vietnam flashbacks, and the house is causing all sorts of mischief for him – there was a lot of mental imagination in that one. Then House II went into a fantasy world; it was more of a magical house.
Sean wanted to move back towards a horror film, but the movie didn’t end up really being about the house; it was about Brion James traveling through electrical wires and terrorizing Lance Henriksen. I was willing to suspend disbelief and I think it worked, but like I said, it had a lot of issues. I think it went through three or four directors, and it changed so much, they called it The Horror Show, because it was such a departure from the tradition of the House series. But we brought the whacky horror fun back into it with the fourth one, where I actually played a singing pizza.
But also in 1988, you had DeepStar Six, which was a fantastic score, but I think the movie was buried 
under the waves of other underwater based movies of the time.
Yeah, that was the year of the underwater movie. You had The Abyss, Leviathan, and a couple others. Some people said that my score was the best, so I was happy about that. I actually thought all three movies were a letdown when it came to the payoff, especially DeepStar Six. I worked so hard to make that monster seem amazing, and then it turned out to be a big crab. But other than that, I did think it was an amazing film.
There was no doubt that you were underwater. There was one scene where they open the door and 50,000 gallons of water comes flooding into the room, and I wrote in my notes, “What do you write under a flood of water?” And then I thought, “Nothing, you get the hell out of the way!” It was such a huge sound, it didn’t need music. But I’m really proud of that score.
Where did you get inspiration for that score? I drew some connections between that and John Barry’s music for The Deep.
Actually, I love John Barry, but I don’t think I’ve ever really looked to him for inspiration. I actually listen to a lot of Debussy, and he had this one piece called La Mer. There’s a lot of that orchestration sound in DeepStar Six, especially how he dealt with the horns and woodwinds. And then I took the Debussy orchestration, and shuffled it with John Corigliano’s techniques in Altered States and came up with the Harry Manfredini sound for DeepStar Six. But that’s where you really have to go for some great ideas – the classic composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and those guys.
Which leads me to Swamp Thing, which is actually my favorite score in your repertoire; I can’t help but notice a distinct classical influence, especially in the early part of the film. I really like how the music 
balances a bit of elegance with mischievousness.
Oh yeah, the opening of that echoes The Rite of Spring in the swamp. And then I have that little two-note theme for the formula, and a kind of pretty theme for Adrienne [Barbeau]. I actually got that, because Wes Craven was great friends with Sean. He came to me and said, “Wow, great job on Friday the 13th, how would you like to do this?” And I did! What I tried to do with that, as opposed to Friday the 13th, is try to hearken back to the Max Steiner scale of theming, because in a weird sense, it’s a love story.
So what can you tell me about your recent projects, Black Waters of Echo’s Pond and Stingy Jack?
I did Black Waters based on an experience at a horror convention a couple years ago. Sean Clark, who was the writer of the film, had a booth set up, and he said, “Watch the trailer and get a free t-shirt.” And I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a free shirt, so I watched it. I was genuinely interested after that, and I asked him who was doing the music. He said that no one was signed for it yet, but they were looking at a couple guys. So I said, “so why aren’t you asking me if I’d be interested in doing it?”
It is a horror film, but it’s a different kind of horror, which intrigued me. It’s kinda like Jumanji with Swamp Thing and Texas Chainsaw Massacre mixed in. It’s about a game that was hidden in an ancient Turkish mine, but gets discovered by a group of kids. The game is tied to the Greek god Pan, whose name is the basis for “pandemonium.” And when you play, it brings out the worst possible parts of your character. It’s a very imaginative film. For the score, I used a lot of old and ancient sounding instruments and created themes that depicted the game taking control of these kids.
With Stingy Jack, I am wearing several hats. But that one is still stewing in the pot right now. It’s got a good cast. One of the things I’ve been dabbling in on the side is script consulting. And as we have been going along with Stingy Jack, it got to a point where I said, “Look, if I was writing the script, this is how I would do it.” So I gave the notes to the director [Todd Langseth], and he wants me to do the score. The movie is about a guy that is trapped between worlds – he’s not in heaven, he’s not in hell, and he’s not on earth – and he’s not very happy about it.
I have no idea how the final script is going to turn out. I did submit the first 40 pages, but from there, I don’t know where it’s going to go. I do a lot of script consulting, actually. I even did a little on Black Waters, but that was subsequent to it being shot. And as far as the score for Stingy Jack, I have no idea how it’s going to go yet. I’ve also got some other original story ideas, but I’m taking things one project at a time right now.
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