Harry Manfredini’s Friday The 13th soundtrack…
…and what it says about getting ahead in today’s creative industry.
Harry Manfredini’s “Ki… Ki… Ki… Ma… Ma… Ma…” might be one of the most iconic and recognizable musical cues in all of horror cinema — right beside Bernard Hermann’s stabbing, squealing, atonal strings from Psycho’s shower scene, or John Carpenter’s eerie, malefic, minimalist 5/4 synth score for Halloween.
Manfredini was practically a rookie when Sean S. Cunningham asked him to score the first Friday The 13th, which would go on to become one of the most successful horror film franchises in history. The composer had only a few production films and a couple low-budget thrillers to his name. Manfredini came into the film industry at an important cross-section in time, particularly in regards to film music. Manfredini made his career at the crossroads — between tradition and innovation; of great musical instincts and an urge to succeed, willing to do whatever it took to realize his lifelong ambition of composing soundtracks.
These liminal historical moments — and the art that they product — reveal a lot about the times on both side of the divide. It’s like finding a missing link in the evolutionary chain and discovering the cause for diabetes, or why an organism has flat teeth. It gives us perspective.
The Roots Of Harry Manfredini’s Horrorscores
Manfredini’s music for Friday the 13th might very well be one of the last truly grand orchestral works for film, particularly horror. While huge budget Hollywood movies retained the resources to work with full orchestra, lower-budget horrors had to scale back, with the onset of digital recording and instruments. The mighty, full-blown orchestra was replaced with Korgs and Yamaha DX7’s, and an era (and possibly a craft) was lost to history.
As a lifelong lover of film soundtracks, Manfredini was influenced by the Golden Age of thriller music, particularly Bernard Hermann’s masterful jazz malaise for Hitchcock’s ’60s films like Psycho.
Working with full orchestra meant that composers like Bernard Hermann had to be REAL composers and conductors, working in the classical music lexicon. This offered the opportunity for highly-trained, adventurous musical architects to construct a full dialect of music for shattered nerves, fever dreams, psychosis, murder, and death.
Harry Manfredini’s soundtrack work for the Friday The 13th franchise largely sticks to this orchestral pallet, which is augmented with post-production and special FX, rather than synthesizers or electronics. Rather, ominous whispers, tortured metal, pinprick strings, and groaning pianos are thrown down a mineshaft of echoes and reverb, in a way that speaks more the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer than Carpenter’s grubby electronics, or the pop soundtracks that would shortly be coming.
In this respect, Manfredini’s music also stands at the crossroads of the Grand Hollywood Tradition and a kind of psyched-out post-industrial ’70s aesthetic — all clanging metal and mangled microphones — as can be heard on horrorscores like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Eraserhead (1977).
What Harry Manfredini’s Friday The 13th Soundtrack Tells Us About Getting Ahead In Today’s Creative Industry
“One day, he (Bill Ramal, producer for The Shirelles and Del Shannon) asked me, ‘Harry, what is it you want to do,’ Manfredini told Fact Magazine in 2015, when asked how he started composing film soundtracks. “I meekly answered ‘I want to write film scores.’ He said, what are you going to write that Mancini or Goldsmith can’t write? I answered in a somewhat hopeless voice, ‘I don’t know, but you asked what I wanted to do and that is what I want to do.’ He then said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want to do, here is a list of things to do to get there.”
Having a helpful, guiding hand is always a boon, when starting out in any career. It’s triply important in the creative world, when so much of society is critical of any kind of career in the arts.
IT IS POSSIBLE TO MAKE A LIVING AS A CREATIVE INDIVIDUAL.
NEVER BELIEVE OTHERWISE.
It’s just a lot of work and a lot of risk and uncertainty. Seeing as how this is the case for almost every industry, why not follow your dreams?
When you do something you love, you have the extra oomph to go above and beyond, truly excelling at what you do, which is the only way to REALLY get somewhere in this world.
Here’s 8 Lessons You Can Take From Harry Manfredini’s Friday The 13th Horrorscores:
1.Work For Free, But Not For Long: “The next day I started on the list. First: Asking the studio owner to let me write his theme song for a movie he was making — and I would do it for free. How could he say no? Well, I did. And guess what? He liked it. The engineer at the studio liked it too. We took the tracks, and made another version that we used as a commercial. A friend of the engineer heard the tracks, and asked if I would do some demos for him. I said sure, I will do them for free. I did two of them. They sounded great.”
Working for free to get established in our industries in not exactly a newsflash. In fact, it’s probably been this way since the beginning for almost any career you’d actually want to do. And while there’s a lot of criticism towards asking freelancers to work for free (i know, trust me, i know), a certain amount of interning and volunteering is probably going to be necessary to get established and make the necessary contacts.
While starting out, you’re going to have to give a lot away — your time, your money, your help, your sleep, your peace of mind. You’re going to have to work while you’re not working, and you might start feeling like you’ve just had triplets — which you have, essentially: your work, your career, and your new life.
To make this phase as short as possible, try and decide ahead of time what niche you’re trying to break into, and start building clips towards that goal. If you want to do video production, start a YouTube Channel. Graphic design? Get on Behance.
And remember: the world needs content! Badly! And there’s people who will pay for mid-level work, like smaller websites or businesses, that need great work for a good deal. As one final perk, in this arrangement, they’re usually pleased as can be for the help, and will go out of their way to help your business thrive.
2.Find A Way To Do What You Love: This is the only way you’re going to be able to put the time, energy, and attention that will be necessary to truly get your career off of the ground.
Accentuate The Need: “Doing this I can see where the visual has its strong points — and where I can help in creating the effect the director intended. [Where I can] enhance that effect by the way I manipulate the audience [through music]. After that, I look for elements in the film — either visual or plot points, characters, or effects, or even a prop that might be critical to the story and might have narrative value. The film composer is really more of a dramatist sometimes than composer. It is the job of the composer to enhance and delineate the story and the intent of the director by way of music, using colours and sonorities that evoke and reveal to the audience those intentions of the writer and director.”
Remember, as artists and creative individuals, it is our job to help others realize their visions, not inflict ours on them (unless you’re making your own art, then you have complete control). When exchanging work for money, you are offering a service. While some customers/clients may be totally open to whatever ideas you might have, a lot of times they have something in mind, and don’t have the necessary time or resources to pull off what they’re going for.
3.Know Music Theory: If you’re working with music, it is STRONGLY advised you learn some music theory, if only the basic vocabulary. While there’s a lot of spite towards technical musicians and book learning, in the music world, the fact is that music is a language. Music Theory gives us the proper vocabulary, and grammar, to communicate with one another.
Even if you’re on the creative team, as a writer or director, it couldn’t hurt to know some basic terminology, if you’re going to have anything to do with music or sound, as it can help you better collaborate with the Music Supervisor and musicians.
4.Don’t Limit Yourself To Music Theory: “Live was another program that I fought against using for a long time, and then I thought of collage art and how artists would take rather random, and odd elements and create something original. Once I understood that, I tried the same thing with music.
I opened (Ableton) Live and just randomly grabbed a bunch of samples not even knowing what they were — some rhythmic, some American Indian, some simply electronic, others synth sounds — and said to myself, I am going to create something out of these elements. And after a little while, I had a rather interesting piece which in no way was possible other than with this program and these rather odd combinations of sounds. So I sold myself. And now it is a part of my arsenal of devices.”
There is no room to be precious, in the creative industry. We should have as many tools and techniques in our magician’s belt as possible, to be utterly versatile and help our clients and collaborators realize their vision.
While we adore the high production values of big orchestral scores, we simply can’t ignore 30 years of electronic evolution. We must understand synths, know how to program beats, know how to manipulate audio. We can’t limit ourselves to regressive techniques, but instead must always be pushing forward.
It is the job of musicians and artists to understand the times we are living in, to try and help others do the same.
4.DYNAMICS!: One of the downsides of working electronically is a predilection towards static, unchanging music, which can get REAL boring, REAL fast. Fine-tuning electronic compositions, via things like velocity and accents, as well as working in tempo shifts and builds, require a masterful touch, taking much more time, energy, and attention. A masterful touch is what is necessary to help you build your career, however. Keep that in mind at all times, and take pride in every aspect of what you do!
5.Use Unconventional Notes, Chords, Melodies, Time-Signatures, and Song Structures: One of the most exciting thing about horrorscores is their ability to express strange states, unpleasant emotions, insanity, magick, things outside of the ken of reason or logic.
Most pop composers aren’t going to express a nervous breakdown; nihilistic, mind-melting heartbreak; apathy, ennui, misanthropy, or even just plain old depression. If they do, they’ll likely still try and make it palatable to the ear, to try and get people to listen.
Horrorscore composers have no such qualms or compulsion. Their only job is to accentuate the mood of what is happening, no matter how horrible, psychotic, or uncomfortable.
As we move forward into the 21st Century, there is a certain risk, regarding the popularization of music. While our songwriting and musicianship gets polished to a razor’s edge, more avant-garde forms like noise or experimental music might get phased out, as it’s not as popular. Or when it’s made, it will be for increasingly smaller audiences and with limited budgets.
As lovers of the occult, the supernatural, the in-between; as margin walkers and shadow dwellers, think of what we could do if we were to explore the darker side of life with a big budget and high production values!
6.Don’t Be Afraid To Be Hollywood: “I once did a short film called the Last Gandy Dancer, about a young boy and his grandpa. It was about learning to deal with death. The child loved his grandpa and was going to have to deal with his dying of cancer. One day at a New York University screening I was sitting with the director, and the students were there and, as young filmmakers can be, they were blunt and a bit green. One young fellow asked, “Isn’t this music a bit Hollywood-y?” with a derogatory tone. I was just starting out, and was a bit shaken by his barb.
My director, Burt Salzman, took the microphone and cautioned the young man. He said, you are reacting to your reaction. You were watching the film, you were pulled in by it, and you started to cry. And you hated that — because we got you. And then you said, why am so so emotional? And you said, it’s that damn music! It’s so Hollywoody. Yes it was. It worked. And it worked on you. I loved that response and I use it when I can.”
That being said, we should every tool at our disposal — “the right tool for the job” as carpenters say (not John Carpenter, although he’d probably agree with the sentiment). We shouldn’t be afraid to use big, cinematic John Adams strings, if it’s an emotional moment, just to seem more “underground”.
Remember, it’s our jobs, as musicians or composers or producers (or wherever you fall in the creative industry) to help our clients realize their vision, not inflict ours on them.
7.Combining The Virtual And The Real: Manfredini’s horrorscores are built around his classical orchestral palate, which is accentuated with eerie theremin-like feedback warbles, ominous, blood-curdling echoes, and sinister, ghostly echoes.
The synths and sequencers wouldn’t come in until the oddly funky coldwave theme of Friday The 13th Part III:
Art that’s made entirely digitally, as is parodied by vaporwave, has a tendency to slip right past our attention without making a splash. It’s not rooted in anything real or tactile, and our nervous systems don’t know how to process it, except with the vague repulsion of “the uncanny valley”, when we get too close to being lifelike.
The real potential comes in combining the real and the virtual, as can be seen/heard in today’s underground dance music. To illustrate, think of the earliest, cheapest CGI vs. the digital hordes of The Lord Of The Rings movies, where they filmed a bunch of extras and replicated them digitally. It still gives kind of a weird feeling, with so many of the same faces in the same place (which is physically impossible), but it’s still better than something like Aliens 3.
8.Evocative Titles: One of the greatest things about soundtracks in general, and especially horrorscores, are the way that the titles illustrate what’s happening on-screen. Song titles like “Don’t Smoke In Bed” or “Not Tonight, I’ve Got A Headache” tell you exactly what’s going on, on-screen.
Contrast this with some kind of generic “I’ve Got A Feeling”-type title, (even something as unstoppable as Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop The Feeling.”) I can’t stop the feeling I’ve heard that title before, and will likely again, a thousand more times.
Interesting, compelling, imaginative titles help your art to stand out from the pack, revealing something of your actual personality, which will help you gain a real following.
J. Simpson is an obsessive cultural critic and creator, living and working in Portland, Or. He’s undertaken the unrecommended path of trying to master three disparate artforms — music, creative writing, and criticism — with the perhaps idealistic belief that good art makes the world a better place. He is the author of the Forestpunk online journal, investigating the intersection of the supernatural, occult, and horror and culture, especially music. He is the co-founder of Bitstar Productions, with his partner and soulmate Lily H. Valentine. J and H play music together in the slowcore/trip-hop/dream folk band Meta Pinnacle.
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