ABSTRACT
Several tourist-oriented productions of the early 2000s incorporated soundtracks that combined original scores by international composers, popular music compilations and diegetic performances by local musicians. Screenplays for two later tourism films involved American women seeking romance in Ireland. While tourism films pandered to stereotypes, many domestic filmmakers strove to communicate an urban, sexually liberal and self-confident Ireland, proposing alternatives to rural and pre-modern tropes, and providing relief from disturbing historical subjects and/or violent themes. An antithesis to cosmopolitan, trendy and politically correct themes is proposed in Paddy Breathnach’s 2004 rural crime caper Man about Dog. The emergence of a body of Irish-based horror features in the early 2000s not only proposed a de-romanticization of Ireland as place, but also afforded novel approaches to soundtrack. The brutal murder in 1996 of crime journalist Veronica Guerin by Dublin drug lords led to two narrative features.
