Silva Screen Records release the soundtrack to the 1986 road thriller / horror movie The Hitcher. The film was scored by Mark Isham, who delivers a genre redefining electronic soundtrack. He was originally asked by the producers to compose a John Williams-esque score similar to Jaws, but Isham produced the opposite, steering clear from genre defining sharp orchestral motifs and stabbing dissonances, and instead immersed himself in '80s cutting edge electronics and samples. The result was an emotionally cold and beautiful score, an audio landscape depicting evil and impending doom, the dust and fog of a lonely desert road...

I'm not usually a fan of electronic scores. For the most part, while they work wonderfully in the movies they are designed for, they have a habit of feeling dated and flat when listened to in isolation. However, what Mark Isham delivers for The Hitcher is something rather different. He manages to convey fear, suspense and an ever brooding danger throughout these 14 tracks (42 min, 28 sec) while at the same time delivering ambient background noise that is hypnotic but also unsettling.

Of course, being electronic music, it's aged considerably. But it has not aged anywhere near as much as Vangelis's work in the '80s or Brad Fiedel's score for The Terminator (1984).

Mark Isham gives insight into his scoring process: "Technically the music business was in a crossroads and new instruments and new instrument technologies were appearing every day. I availed myself of this 'new' technology of 'sampling' and brought in two drummers who played only originally sampled drums. I was still using my early system of a Prophet 5, an Oberheim 4 voice and my ARP 2600. To this I added this new keyboard, a Prophet 2000 (sampler). This was the 'band!'"

Isham delivers more than a soundtrack. It's a memorable album of visceral themes that almost awaken something primordial in the listener. It's certainly an interesting listen and we should be grateful that Silva Screen Records have finally made this diverse and rich score available to hear in all its glory.

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Darren Rea