GUEST BLOG: Soundtrack spotlight - A Nightmare on Elm Street

This month’s soundtrack spotlight goes to a classic favourite; A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

At the helm of this synth centred soundscape is composer Charles Bernstein.  This stands out as one of Bernstein’s earliest film scores, yet quite different from his earlier projects. One of which being the Oscar winning documentary ‘Czechoslovakia’.

The opening scene shows our favourite villain Freddy, making his signature glove, while this first scene plays out synth drones overlap and swell with occasional percussion leading to a crescendo into the opening credits and introducing us to the main musical theme.  This gives us our first taste of the sinister almost music-box style lullaby music.

In the next scene as the main characters walk into school we are greeted with the children’s skipping song over the music them music beautifully foreshadowing things to come. After this the music takes a backseat until everyone goes to bed at Tina’s sleepover when a single note melody begins to play, using a serial technique which helps to create unease as the melody line does not resolve in a standard way, this builds to two staccato striking chords repeated in quick succession.

During Tina’s dream/death scene the music builds to a much more percussive movement as Tina is being chased and then cuts to a high pitched drone, this is a repeated motif throughout the narrative, where more percussive sounds represent Freddy chasing his victims. This is next shown during Nancy’s classroom dream which takes on the similar style to that of Tina’s in the way in which the music builds, at first with the overlapping drones to create dread and then the percussion to create tension during the chase.

Slight deviations from the main style occur a few times during the film, such as the bridge scene where Glen and Nancy are discussing dreams, with a slightly lighter melody.  Another example is during Glen’s death scene, the percussive music used for chase scenes is replaced by high pitched repeated staccato stabbing chords.   

During Nancy’s final dream sequence and confrontation of Freddy, all of the techniques used throughout the film come together to create a fantastic crescendo.

All in all the soundtrack to this film is testament to the depth that can be achieved with synthesizers!  Go on, give it a listen.