Editorials
Let’s Bite Into The Haunting ‘Martin’ Soundtrack
In 1978, nestled between The Crazies and Dawn Of The Dead, George A. Romero wrote and directed the criminally under-appreciated vampire film Martin, which tells the tale of a man who may or may not be a vampire and the struggles he goes through with his dark, terrible secret. It’s a subtle film, one that embraces the development of characters and plays with the viewers emotions and expectations of the title character. Should he be pitied or loathed? After all, the film opens with the horrific and calculated murder of a woman on a train. But afterwards? John Amplas’ masterful portrayal stirs feelings and challenges judgments as we try to determine how to think of this flawed character.
The score of the film was composed by Donald Rubinstein, who is the man behind the music of Tales From The Darkside, Monsters, and Bruiser. A jazz musician at heart, Rubinstein took his years of music training and applied them to the score for Martin, resulting in a soundtrack that is as diverse and conflicted as Martin is himself.
Note: I am using newly remastered files from the upcoming Ship To Shore PhonoCo. vinyl release as the basis for this piece.
If you haven’t heard the music of Martin, you are truly doing yourself a disservice. It’s a glorious piece of work, ranging from heartbreakingly beauty to scattered, frantic jazz, from playfully charming to being reminiscent of early Universal monster scores. There is also a lovely variety of instrumentation, many sounds of which tug at the heart with their unnatural yet sublime textures.
In an interview we conducted with Rubinstein back in 2011, he explained that the soundtrack did not come easily: “It came blistered and tormented and committed – an uncovering that wrestled with personal discipline in an effort to do the best job I could.”
In many ways, this describes Martin himself. He’s a tormented man, one that seemingly takes no pleasure in the murders he commits, mainly because they don’t play out in reality as he hopes they will in his fantasies. And yet his personal discipline is something he takes pride in, the fastidiousness of his work mirrored by the precision of the music.
The music highlights the complexities that the viewer faces when watching this film. As I stated, the music runs through many gamuts of emotion, much as we do with Martin. We see beauty and feel pity, which Rubinstein wonderfully evokes in pieces such as “The Calling”, which features an angelic voice crooning over a subdued and melancholic piano, strings and wind instruments mournfully expressing themselves. However, we also experience the sudden and abrupt change of empathy to uncertainty and terror, as evidenced in “Modern Vamp”, which begins innocently, almost childishly, only to fade away and come back in with dissonance and conflicting melodies. And then there’s “Martin at the Butcher Shop”, which if heard outside of the context of the film would sound like the backdrop to a pleasant stroll through Parisian parks.
At the end of the day, Rubinstein has crafted a score that should be revered among not only horror fans, but those who see music as a medium to convey a story. Since hearing it, it’s become one of my favorites and I hope it becomes one of yours.
You can pre-order your copy of Martin right here. Be sure to follow Ship To Shore PhonoCo. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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