On the cusp of the climactic moments of Paramount’s 1932 cult classic Island of Lost Souls, a group of tortured beast-men work out the central hypocricy of their maker, a sociopathic Dr. Moreau played by the masterful Charles Laughton.
Bela Lugosi, nearly unrecognizable under his wild mane of hair, plays the Sayer of the Law. His famous mantra, “What is the law? Are we not men?” is usually echoed back in a discordant but placated murmur, keeping the troubled humanoids subservient to their unhinged master.
But not this time.
Another creature named Ouran, who had been pressured just hours earlier to attack a defenseless woman at the behest of Dr. Moreau himself, nods at the bloody corpse of a man gripped in his hand.
“These men like him?” he asks, gesturing up towards the god-like Moreau, who watches from afar with an expression very near to madness.
“Man like him,” returns the Speaker.
“Man dead,” Ouran says, ever to the point.
“Dead,” repeats the Speaker, like he is weighing the word for the first time.
Ouran follows the thread, “He can die?” pointing again at the god-like Moreau.
After a great and heavy pause, the Sayer of the Law says quietly:
“He can die.”
This world-shaking philosophical struggle gets at the very heart of this story’s long-lasting appeal; the original science fiction novel by H.G. Wells has prompted multiple adaptations into film, television and radio since it was released in 1896.
This particular version has enjoyed a small legacy—it has even influenced and been directly referenced by an odd group of musical acts like Devo, Oingo Boingo, The Meteors, The Cramps, Van Halen, and Blondie. The rap group House of Pain quotes it on their self-titled album which itself is a reference to the chamber in which Moreau performs his terrible vivisections. It is the violence of these procedures, along with his line, “Do you know what it means to feel like god?” that got the film banned in the UK until 1958, and not released uncut until 2011.
Strangely enough, director Erle C. Kenton is known more for his comedies, but he was pushed by Universal Studios into directing a few lackluster monster movies in the mid-40s before finishing his career in television. Island of Lost Souls stands as perhaps his most important and well-received film. But despite the prudish censorship of the BBFC, its appeal didn’t come from being particularly violent or horrific. There is in fact a somewhat comedic element to the film, and a lack of malice that may have more to do with the technology of the time than it does Kenton’s direction.
When Ouran (the poor soul who eventually challenges the Law of the island) breaks into the room of the sleeping Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams) under the direction of Dr. Moreau, he does so by quietly wrestling away the bars on her window.
It was at this late point in the film when I finally articulated something that had been bothering me subconsciously up to that point: where is the music? Where are the frenetic strings anticipating a brutal attack, or the ghastly waterphone setting our nerves on edge?
Excluding the opening and end credits, there is no musical score of any kind. My light bulb moment struck me then as surprisingly profound, and begged the question: when did film scores become a thing? In hindsight (and with a basic understanding of film history) none of it should not have come as a surprise.
Let’s backtrack a bit.
At first, music in movies was performed by live musicians, using a combination of improvisation and written score to accompany silent films. Besides the aesthetic and emotional effect, this had a practical purpose: to cover up the sound of the noisy projector.
At a certain point, the film industry was the largest source of employment for instrumental musicians in the United States. So it wasn’t just silent film stars that panicked at the onset of synchronized sound: the advent of “the talkies” combined with the Great Depression proved disastrous for many musicians.
In 1926, just a few years before the official death of the Silent Era, Warner Bros.’ Don Juan became the first feature length film to employ a synchronized soundtrack using their Vitaphone system, though this did not include dialogue. The very next year, The Jazz Singer brought it all together with a soundtrack that included music, effects, and the voices of the actors on the screen. For the next several years, studios and theaters scrambled to catch up.
Six years later, Austrian-born Max Steiner wrote the first comprehensive, synchronized film score for King Kong (1933). He went on to compose music for films such as Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Gone With The Wind, Now Voyager, and over 200 others. He has been called “the father of film music.” You might think of him as a predecessor to John Williams.
For a voracious consumer of modern horror cinema, the absence of a film score is a monumental and jarring thing, like suddenly experiencing the world without one of your senses. The audience often takes for granted film scores—indeed, some justifiably say that a good score is like good design, or a good defenseman on the pitch: the higher the quality, the less you see it.
Regardless of how much you think that film scores should be noticed by audiences, their use has become ubiquitous, and they are tremendously important to the experience of watching a movie. Nowhere is this more true than in horror.
In a genre so heavily reliant upon mood and atmosphere, score is the most effective technique to evoke powerful sensations of paranoia and suspense. An otherwise benign shot of just about anything can evoke dread with the right score and soundtrack, whether it is achieved through electronic ambience or more classical instrumentation.
Consider the infamous “shower scene” from Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho. Bernard Herrmann’s jagged strings transform the dimension and impact of the scene in a way that has been often imitated since then. Without music, the scene is brutal. With music, it is terrifying. It is the difference between disgust and fear, a distinction which cannot be overemphasized.
When John Carpenter screened a pre-soundtrack final cut reel of Halloween for a studio executive months before its release in the fall of 1978, he noted with some disappointment that “she wasn’t scared at all.” Determined to “save” the movie, Carpenter and sound designer Dan Wyman wrote the entire score for Halloween in a matter of days, without the use of traditional spotting or synchronization. What they came out of that tiny Los Angeles studio with was quite possibly the most instantly recognizable horror theme of all time, and a film that stands as the defining moment of Carpenter’s legacy as a filmmaker.
In 1992, Bernard Rose’s Candyman did for bathroom mirrors what Jaws did for the beach, while examining the intricate scar tissue of America’s racial injustices. But its effect would have been mightily diminished without Philip Glass’ bellowing pipe organ, eerie piano and haunting choir.
More recently, Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow invoked the inexplicable for Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018). Their modern score mirrored the arc of the science fiction bio-horror film all the way from domestic mundanity to consciousness-collapsing weirdness, and found something in its distorted, swooping synths and and ghostly arias that felt deeply and unmistakably alien.
Wherever you go in this genre, especially among those films considered “classics,” you will find moving and indispensable scores. It is no coincidence. Our biology nearly demands it—music engages our limbic system in a way that silent and pre-score films simply do not, and what was once bemoaned by some as the noisy doom of an entire medium now seems a fundamental key to the doors opened to us by watching (and listening to) movies.
I am not trying to suggest that silent films are not worth our time, or have lost their ability to move and shock. But I am saying that in terms of sound and music, modern audiences are not able to put that cat back in the bag—and why the hell would they want to?
Since I wasn’t thinking about exactly where Island of Lost Souls lies on the timeline of film history, I was unconsciously bemused by its curious atonality long before I even realized it. The great suffering weight of suspense that might have existed while Leila slept, unaware of her immediate danger, was instead just a hairy man worrying away at a metal bar on her window. The silence was so loud it was noticeable. The lack of a score seemed suddenly and nakedly obvious, and the suspense conjured by the scene felt oddly muted. Island of Lost Souls, and other pre-score cult movies of its like, still find ways to engage us even decades later but they do it despite the absence of film music.
In that climactic scene in which Ouran and the Speaker break the spell of Dr. Moreau’s seeming infallibility and realize that their god is just a man, we would expect an orchestral crash of punctuation—a musical exclamation point emphasizing the gravity of such a moment. And a few years later, we would have had it. Instead we can only appreciate that, at the beginning of a new era in cinema, we can hear anything at all.