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Pino Donaggio's THE HOWLING score sampled in SCREAMERS?

posted 9 years ago by swr2777-1
1 reply | jump to latest

(I posted this on another page, but thought it might be helpful to do so here, too.)

I hope I'm not alone in noticing this.

Pino Donaggio has a very distinctive sound, and his beloved score to THE HOWLING is very consistent with his entire body of work around this time.

The infamous Italian horror/fantasy film SCREAMERS (aka ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN) was ultimately given US release by the same pocket of low-budget producers/distributors, and with its tacked-on American-shot prologue involving many of the Roger Corman/New World Pictures/Avco Embassy usual suspects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Jvk3KoWzQ

Obviously, a whole other score composer is credited to SCREAMERS/FISHMAN akin to its original Italian production team. However, if one watches that American-shot prologue added for the American release (in the link above)...those stingers that are heard just as the fishmen attack the treasure hunters (and also one during a jump scare when something freaks out Eunice Bolt in the cave) sound an awful lot like a Donaggio HOWLING score excerpt.

In particular, they sound like a very short excerpt of a much longer Donaggio HOWLING track that is then sampled back-to-back(-to-back-to-back...) to create a quick succession of strings riffs that create the total stinger effect.

Can anyone else confirm or deny this? Has it been mentioned anywhere, or have any of you at least noticed it? If looking at that link above, pay particular attention to those attack moments. That's the bit I'm referring to.

[–] angeldibujo 8 years ago

I haven't noticed the similarities with Donaggio's THE HOWLING.

In fact, the soundtrack album with the excellent music by Luciano Michelini for the Italian (original) version was released in Italy in 1979, and then in the USA in 1981 with a new title, SCREAMERS, and different cover art. The music was the same (I've got both versions), although the tracks were retitled and put in a different order. Four minutes of music, related to tribal percusive sounds, were removed for the US LP. All the music featured in the US album (released by WEB Records and coordinated by Jim Wynorski) was in the Italian LP (released in the Cometa label).

I've checked the link from your post and I've heard some fragments of Michelini's music here and there, along with another excerpts that I can't identify. I'm sorry, but I don't know if they could be from THE HOWLING...

I've read at IMDB that Sandy Berman, who is a sound editor and designer, was the additional music composer for the US version. I suppose he didn't compose anything, but edited Michelini's music and mixed it up with some kind of library music from other New World movies.

On the other side, Joe Dante (as Giuseppe Dantini) was an associate editor for the additional US sequences. Who knows? May be Dante himself chose to use Donaggio's music, taken from his own movie THE HOWLING.