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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
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Reviews
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  I can understand why Ottman's score was rejected.
by Shawn Watson (October 26, 2010)
After a brilliant opening track, it's all downhill for the rest of John Ottman's rejected Halloween H20 score, much like the series itself. A talented composer, Ottman's approach to this awful film was simply to mimic Marco Beltrami's sounds to the Scream series, which was popular at the time and reawakened the dull slasher genre to late 90s audiences. Halloween H20 was an attempt to breathe new life into the series which had degenerated with every pure garbage installment since the first. It failed, miserably, thanks largely to savvy filmgoers realizing that new cliches are just as tedious as old cliches.
But here's the real irony. The producers didn't like his music (as if they are expert judges in taste!) and replaced it with tracked-in music from Scream, Scream 2 and Mimic (there's that word again). So what we actually got in the film was a sort of "reverse temp score" with little bits of Ottman's cues tying them together. Neither of these efforts are notable and are merely just loud noises and stingers (to compensate for the lack of finely-tuned scares caught in front of the camera) with a tiny bit of melody drowned-out in the background. As much as the Friday the 13th series was hated by critics at least Harry Manfredini's music was a hundred times more complex than this trash.
Ottman is a better composer than Beltrami, but neither of them will ever reach the heights of Goldsmith, Silvestri or even Zimmer. The main problem is that they both got their break scoring these awful slasher films and use the same orchestration and tricks for nearly every movie. The melodic, lyrical quality of film scores has nosedived in the past decade and unimaginative horror scores are just unforgivable.
You want to hear divine horror? Check out Christopher Young's Hellraiser.
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