ABSTRACT

Halloween indeed features images from The Thing and Forbidden Planet. For the most part, though, the cameo appearances go to isolated fragments of these films’ soundtracks. Except for mentions of clearly measurable attendance figures for off-hours screenings of certain music-rich films, Mathijs and Sexton, like Cherry, offer no real criteria for determining the ‘cult’ status of film music of any sort. They do, however, offer numerous examples of films whose music arguably qualifies for that status, and they divide these films, roughly yet more or less systematically, into ‘musicals,’ films featuring music by established performers, films with compiled soundtracks, and films with original scores. As for ‘cult’ soundtracks consisting for the most part of original material from a single composer, the only scores common to both lists are those for Gordon Parks’s Shaft, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.