Richard Band - Career

Career

Since the late 1970s Band has been composing film music for horror and science fiction films regularly. His first notable score was for 1977's Laserblast, which he co-composed with Joel Goldsmith (son of famed composer Jerry Goldsmith). By the mid-80's Band was renowned for scoring horror films by employing strong, memorable and often very melodic themes. Films like Mutant (aka Night Shadows), The Alchemist, The House on Sorority Row, Ghostwarrior, Troll and The Day Time Ended all feature beautiful and lyrical themes that seem to operate as the antithesis of the genre for which the films were produced. As Band explains in the liner notes for the La-La Land Records release of Laserblast, he believes film scores should exist “to add the third dimension to a two-dimensional medium.” From Beyond, Band's second collaboration with Stuart Gordon following 1985's Re-Animator (performed by the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra) is considered a horror classic within the film score circle, featuring odd tonalities and creative, otherworldly orchestration. He would later go on to score Gordon’s subsequent films such as The Pit and the Pendulum and 1995’s Castle Freak, the later of which featured some inventive writing for a string quartet. 1994's Shrunken Heads (on which he collaborated with his more mainstream counterpart Danny Elfman) features big band jazz music, while Dragonworld, Paramount's kid-friendly fantasy film of the same year pitted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra against a plethora of folksy, Celtic and ethnic influences. Since around 1990 onward Band's work has declined in regularity and scope. Today he works primarily in television, with sparse film projects coming his way. In 2006 he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for his work on the television series, Masters of Horror.