Scoring Call of Cthulhu

I'm a big fan of film scores as a source for scenario underscore...

   The trick to using film scores... and it is a bit of work... is to categorize cues.
If you take a favorite composer of mine, Bernard Herrmann, you will find that a score like Psycho is extremely useful, but you don't want the shower murder cue to pop out at the wrong moment. Actually, I wouldn't use the Shower Murder music at all, nor the Prelude and related cues... Those cues are too recognizable. That leaves almost half an hour of quietly (disquietingly) menacing music + another nine minutes of cues which are similar but with a tempo which suggests greater tension.
   The real trick is to find cues from other scores by the same composer to intersperse. In the case of the Psycho cues, I expanded the first category (Quietly Menacing) to almost an hour and the second category to over thirty-five minutes with cues from Vertigo, North By Northwest and material from the CBS Library recordings, The Twilight Zone scores etc. .
   You have to be a bit obsessive to put together a really broad collection of cues in the many categories that may be useful in play.

  Even scores like Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Mysterious Island can provide a few cues for common CofC situations, although I withhold most of that stuff for cyclopean ruins and vast subterranean lairs.

  In the future, when I blog about scenarios I’ve run, I'll mention the music I used. For now I will provide a brief summary of music used to date.

 
“Homonculous” – The first scenario involved a small, capering humanoid generated by the remnants of an occult experiment conducted fifteen years before the game date in 1921.

·         Bernard Herrmann music in several playlists to cover various levels of tension and weirdness.

·         Richard Band music from Castle Freak, Mutant and Richard Band’s library cues. This was heavily weighted towards the Castle Freak material which has an antic, capering motif which seemed just right.

“Outsider Art” – This scenario concerned artists going mad and disappearing into some sort of lost area in the Sunset District. Since the danger in the scenario was generally out of sight and caused by what amount to extraterrestrial insects… I needed something a bit different. In addition to the usual Bernard Herrmann music I used a lot of Ennio Morricone material from Orca, Moses the Lawgiver and The Thing. I also did something slightly clever by layering a sound effect I had mixed out of insect noises which sometimes came and went behind one version of the playlist. I use sound effects separately on occasion but this allows me to use them with some degree of subtlety, and without having to mess about with the second I-pod.

“Drood” – A lengthy scenario dealing with the Chapel of Contemplation and a plot involving murder of children and some sort of psychic vampirism… In addition to the Bernard Herrmann material, which has been getting quite a workout, I have added a few more composers.

• ·         Miklos Rozsa has provided a creepy theme from Last Embrace. This “ZM” theme, is associated in the film with malignant memories of the Z’vi Migdal, a Jewish criminal organization. Expanded versions of the soundtrack have given me as much as a half hour of related material. I've broken it into two overlapping collections, one creepier and one more prosaic.

• ·         Miklos Rozsa has also provided a collection of action cues from Brute Force, The Killers, Eye of the Needle and The Private Files of J Edgar Hoover. Amazingly enough, these were used while the Investigators were taken on a fast cross-town drive to the scene of a dramatic suicide. Usually such a sequence would be glossed over – being treated as a segue between the actually important parts of the scenario. In this case there was some real interest and I think the music helped to generate tension.

• ·         There’s been occasion to use some material from Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown and LA Confidential, mostly when the Investigators are moving about the city, looking for clues. This is an alternative to the Rozsa "prosaic ZM" collection.

• ·         I’ve also gotten a chance to use one of the playlists I generated for Cthuloid monster attacks. This one contains edited cues from Alien 3 by Eliot Goldenthal and is a frenetically paced pounding, screeching cacophony. Because I needed to have a consistently fast and brutal sound, I cut the cues to remove slow lead-ins, quiet resolutions etc. I suspect Mr. Goldenthal would be appalled.

·     

  My library of music for use in gaming began with the score to Psycho (The Joel McNeely re-performance or the original soundtrack are both the same 40 cues… I don’t prefer one over the other.)

Here are the two initial collections that I took from Psycho.

• Quietly Menacing:-Cues 2, 3, 4, 8, 16, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40 - These cues are supplemented with some from North By Northwest and a few from other sources like the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV scores.

• Waiting – Searching:  Cues 11, 15, 19, 20, 34, - These few cues are heavily supplemented by more from Vertigo, North By Northwest and from a variety of sources including the Twilight Zone scores.

Bernard Herrmann also provided me with a lot of additional music most notably from the many collections of his TV music which have been released over the last 20-30m years.