The month is more than half over and we have yet to honor one of the key individuals who helped bring creepy, twisted movie music to a mainstream aesthetic – Mr. Danny Elfman. While the majority of the movies he scores are “dark” in theme and tone, most of them aren’t actually horror films. However, in 1990, he made moves to begin correcting that minor oversight with Nightbreed.

Prior to this, the bulk of his work had centered on off-beat comedies…and Batman. In fact, Batman immediately preceded Nightbreed, so a lot of residual tones and compositional colors bled into the latter.

1990 was a busy year for Elfman. After Nightbreed, he did a right-left-roundhouse combo with Dick Tracy, Darkman, and what many believe to be one of his finest outings, Edward Scissorhands. And although Nightbreed wasn’t necessarily a popular film (in fact, it was universally panned by critics – it doesn’t even seem like our buddy Roger Ebert even gave it the time of day), it received praise in the underground…so much so that rumors are swirling about a reconstructed “Director’s Cut” of the film, restoring what director Clive Barker felt were a crucial 45-minute addition to the story.

Nightbreed was Clive Barker’s second full-length film behind the director’s chair, following 1987’s Hellraiser. Based on Barker’s 1988 novella Cabal, it was designed as a cross-genre film, which is a difficult task in itself. IMDB bills it as an Action / Fantasy / Horror film, and that really is the best assessment anyone could make outside of nit-picking into verbose subgenres.

The movie revolved around the notion that a tribe of monsters dwelt in a hidden cemetery called Midian and their primary adversaries were the normal human race (as if paralleling the manner in which Native Americans were treated by those pesky settlers in days of yore). It was a bit of a flip on the typical premise of monsters being villains. Here, they are heroes; some of them actually revered or worshiped. And who better to portray the evil nature of humankind than film directing icon David Cronenberg, who remorselessly victimizes Nightbreed’s protagonist and murders families as though he were doing the species a favor (Dexter, anyone)?

Nightbreed ultimately suffered because of mis-promotion, and an advertising campaign that confused the public as to what the film was really about. In several interviews, Barker protested that the film company tried to sell it as a standard slasher film, and that the powers-that-be had no real working knowledge of Nightbreed’s story.

That said, Elfman’s accentuation on dark quirkiness and sanguine fantasy readily proved that he was one of the few people to understand Barker’s elaborate concept. Utilizing an arsenal of non-traditional instrumentation, as well as his trademark string-and-percussion heavy orchestra, Elfman brought the dark to life. In fact, he seemed to play up the tribal theme throughout the score with the use of pan flutes and austere drumming passages.

There are also moments in Nightbreed where Elfman almost seems to invoke the Hellraiser aesthetic through the exploitation of metallic chimes, horn bashes, and sinew-shredding violins – as though he were designing a “Clive Barker sound”. Elsewhere, he pays homage to Bernard Herrmann by adding some sinister fun with string asides and timpani rumbles. And the magnificent score is wistfully perforated with a choir that reflects the emotional strains of various scenes, be it danger, longing, depression, malevolence, or hope.