Composer Ronen Landa releases his score for the movie Eloise. The movie tells the tale of four friends who break into an abandoned insane asylum in search of a death certificate, which will grant one of them a large inheritance. However, finding it soon becomes the least of their worries in a place haunted by dark memories...

The cinematic style of Eloise conjures up the filmmaking of classic noir thrillers. Ronen Landa's approach sees him intertwine the jazz-inflected orchestrations of that era with more contemporary elements. The movie was filmed in a real abandoned asylum and the end result is a multi-layered musical landscape that reflects the modern horrors of the actual abandoned asylum in Michigan and also the hallucinatory time-shifting that the characters experience once inside.

The score contains 20 tracks (49 min, 56 sec) and incorporates the usual creepy horror themes, but mixed in are some beautiful segments of music. 'Pia's Visions' appears to be a standard cliched horror track, but then Landa surprises the listener by incorporating a heartbreakingly beautiful segment into the middle of the mayhem.

'Blending In'; 'Buried Again'; and 'Theme from Eloise' are arguably this album's most memorable tracks - mainly as they house the score's more conventional classically composed themes.

On the whole, I'm not a huge fan of Horror scores (with the exception of soundtracks like Christopher Young's Hellraiser (1987)) and don't generally get a lot out of listening to them for pleasure. However, Landa delivers an intricate, multi-layered feast for the ears. If you're a fan of the genre then you'll get a lot out of this.

7

Darren Rea