By Joseph Bishara.

Watertower Music

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Bishara returns from having scored both the original The Conjuring and the previous film Annabelle, which had been a prequel to it. He brings with him some experience (he also scored Insidious) in creating an unsettling mood with musical motifs.

From the beginning, it’s clear this isn’t going to be a listen-for-pleasure album, as it’s built upon unease – the opposite of easy listening, in fact – but at the same time it’s not unrewarding in the right circumstances. The score in places has something of the air of Bela Bartok’s work, which perhaps isn’t surprising, as horror composers have oft tried to ape Bartok’s ‘Music for Strings and Percussion’ since it was used in The Shining.

Bishara doesn’t crudely ape this, but his use of instruments to build mood and tension rather than to create melody is reminiscent of it, and in a good, effective way. The score is built to fit the events on screen, rather than to be a concert, but its acuity at mood-building goes beyond the film and actually makes for a suitable accompaniment to any decent supernatural horror reading, and as an alternative soundtrack to playing survival horror games, in particular the spooky rather than zombie-fighting types.

This does make the other kind of scoring somewhat dependent on what type of experience the listener is looking for. So, if you like to have appropriate music for spooky reading or gaming, add two to the score below, which is a judgement on the skills used, as Bartok did, to guide mood. If you like to just listen to a nice soundtrack, deduct two… 6/10

David A. McIntee