Sounds of the future: Howard Shore’s scores for the films of David Cronenberg

Throughout his career, Toronto-born film composer Howard Shore has combined mainstream reach with the modernist rigour and range of his influences. Educated at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, his inspirations have included Toru Takemitsu, Ornette Coleman, Nino Rota and John Cage. From 1969 to 1972 he played in jazz-fusion band Lighthouse, before flexing his repertory instincts as music director for Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980.

Shore’s work has since spanned music for films from Penny Marshall’s Big (1988) to David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), with the expansive world-building of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001 to 2003) as his Oscar-winning popular triumph. The latter is celebrated in this month’s inaugural London Soundtrack Festival, alongside arguably his most formative work: his mind-melds with fellow Canadian David Cronenberg.

Over 46 years and 15 features (plus shorts), Shore and Cronenberg have matured in unison, driven by a shared fascination for ideas. Resisting the temptation to merely accentuate on-screen emotions and action, they have become one of the most intelligently ambiguous and exploratory of composer/director pairings. Forming new shapes as each project requires, Shore’s scores nonetheless remain elegantly inquisitive and alluring hallmarks of Cronenberg’s work, recognisable as soon as each film’s title sequence – or “vestibule,” in the director’s chosen metaphor – unfurls.

First notice of this fertile symbiosis arrived with 1979’s The Brood. Cronenberg’s fifth feature drew a sharpened edge from Shore’s high-tension strings, which channelled echoes of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho (1960) score into something jagged, ragged and unpredictable. For Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), Shore treated the recording studio as an instrument, layering electronics and strings to help thicken the films’ conceptual layers. His passion for the lush austerity of Takemitsu’s electro-acoustic experiments helped distinguish Shore’s work amid other 70s peaks of low-budget horror music; later, US rapper Baby Keem revisited Scanners’ score via a sample on 2019’s ‘Moshpit’.

Michael Kamen scored The Dead Zone (1983), but Shore and Cronenberg became inseparably fused with The Fly (1986). Here, Shore gene-spliced a score of symphonic scope and horror gusto with the softer intimacies of a thoughtful romantic chamber study. For Dead Ringers (1988) and M. Butterfly (1993), Shore extended that footing into increasingly lush orchestrations. Between the two, Shore’s facility for collaborative and conceptual internalised world-building helped define Naked Lunch (1992), where Ornette Coleman’s snaking free-jazz saxophone mixed with strings to evoke the Interzone of William S Burroughs’s imagination.

Turning to another radical writer, Shore’s pensive guitar score for Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash seems to linger in the air, seductive and unresolved. For the similarly open-ended VR tale eXistenZ (1999), Shore experimented with voice-like theremins (also well used in his Ed Wood score) and the positioning of orchestral elements to subliminally destabilising effect.

A study in psychological interiors after the vast The Lord of the Rings, Shore’s score for Spider (2002) took that irresolution to minimalist extremes. Working with the Kronos Quartet and using Crash-style loops, this hauntingly avant-garde piece suggested a mind estranged from the consolations of melody, circling and closing in on itself.

As Cronenberg’s films dissected more familiar genres, Shore’s scores distilled their offbeat psychological slant. For the western-style A History of Violence (2005), Shore’s French horn motif suggests notions of heroic nobility that become more distressed as the film progresses. For Eastern Promises (2007) and A Dangerous Method (2008), his piercing strings tease out a sense of repressed, tight-wound emotions.

Shore’s collaborative curiosity helped energise Cosmopolis (2012), where he worked with smartly cynical Toronto alt-rockers Metric on music resembling the silkily sulphurous offspring of Crash and Drive (2011). Likewise, Shore created a hothouse aural climate for the curdled Hollywood fable of Maps to the Stars (2014). Dense and clammy, his febrile soundscapes of tabla rhythms and jazz bass don’t so much underscore the action as enshroud it. 

With Crimes of the Future arriving as a late career high, and The Shrouds awaiting UK release, Shore and Cronenberg’s combined growth curve continues to mutate.

Videodrome was the conceptual pinnacle of Shore’s self-described “guerrilla” work for early Cronenberg. Reflecting the film’s interrogation of reality and fantasy in resourceful sound design, Shore fed a score for strings into a Synclavier II digital synthesiser and mixed in samples to muddy the identity of instrumental elements. Eerily immersive amniotic sounds haunt the score’s fringes, while funereal organs portend climactic character transformations. Shore has noted that he transplanted some of the ideas developed here to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en, richly accomplished genre scores that invest horror music with thought, feeling and grandeur.

The origins of Shore’s trips to Middle-earth perhaps reside in Cronenberg’s fable of the flesh, which maps a journey to middle age and beyond. As Cronenberg teleported to mainstream attention, so Shore embraced the symphonic with a score that suggests Scanners revisited with the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s massed assistance. Cronenberg recalled producer Mel Brooks worrying that the music was “too much,” but the director insisted grandeur was in the DNA of his allegory of human decline. Shore’s score mixed full-bore orchestral force with twinkling intimacies, conveying a sense of existential dread within a tragi-romantic framework. Mirroring the film’s operatic sensibilities, Shore reimagined the tale as an opera in 2008.

After the melodrama of The Fly, Shore brought a sorrowed sense of pillowy beauty to Cronenberg’s 11th feature. Working once again with the London Philharmonic, he used the orchestra to achingly luxurious and deeply unnerving effect – here, disturbing images arrived framed by one of the loveliest scores in Shore and Cronenberg’s filmography. The results amplified the tale’s mournful themes of separation powerfully, becoming more damaged and heart-rending as they progress. For Tolkien fans who voiced doubts about Shore’s ability to flourish in Middle-earth before The Fellowship of the Ring’s release, this expansive and emotionally fluent score might have been presented as a rejoinder.

Shore built on his harp arrangements for M. Butterfly with Cronenberg’s Ballard adaptation. Working with six electric guitars, three orchestral harps and two percussionists, Shore crafted a work of austere minimalism, using loops, reverb and metallic sounds to evoke a sense of hypnotic suspension and non-literal abstraction. The glinting score also managed to make guitars sound fresh, registering the influences of noise-rock or post-rock (heard in ‘Where’s the Car,’ especially) in every terse, sharp and resonating note. ‘Prophecy Is Dirty and Ragged’ is the centrepiece: dense, shuddering, elegiac and wholly integral to the film’s merged meditations on sex and death.

Shore continued to evolve with his 16th Cronenberg feature. Mirroring Cronenberg’s vision of microplastics and post-humanity in hybrids of electro-organic mood pieces, Shore astutely balances seamy synthetic soundscapes with queasy chamber symphonies. Bernard Herrmann’s influence seems to linger, albeit with a pulsing electronic makeover. The title-track’s undulating mystique, the industrial groan of ‘Body Is Reality’ and the celestial ‘First Autopsy’ carve deep incisions into Cronenberg’s ideas bank. At the film’s core, the techno drive of ‘Klinek’ kicks in with the vigorous assurance of veterans re-energised by the desire to seek out new ways of operating, new sounds for the challenges of uncharted futures.

David Cronenberg and Howard Shore appear in conversation at Royal Festival Hall on 22 March as part of the inaugural London Soundtrack Festival. They will also introduce screenings of Crash and Dead Ringers at BFI IMAX.