Christopher Young

Even for some fans of film music, Christopher Young may be a lesser known name. Though the New Jersey native has been composing music since the 1980s, he still remains in the shadow of his more famous colleagues. He doesn’t have his own distinctive, inimitable style like they do and one can hear echoes of their essential works in his compositions. For a long time, the heaviest burden on his shoulders was the appellation “Mr. Horror”. But is that any wonder, given the fact that a third of his filmography comprises horror and sci-fi movies and that he breathed life into the diabolical Pinhead in his most famous work? Despite that, however, Christopher Young remains a creator from whom you can learn something and who can be an inspiration to you, at the very least for his immense love of music, his strong will to develop his talent and his ability to come to terms with the impossibility of fulfilling his life’s biggest dreams.

Shortly after completing his studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and the University of North Text (in 1980), Chris Young set out for Los Angeles, where he made his living as a jazz drummer. And that is also where he fell in love for the first time – with the music of Bernard Herrmann, which opened up a new world to him. “Here was someone doing everything I wanted to do. I fell in love with the music before I realized that it was written for movies,” said Young. Filled with enthusiasm and with his goals in place, Young enrolled in the prestigious UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he met not only instructor and composer David Raksin, but many other people in the film. One of them, Stephen Carpenter, had just begun filming the horror B-movie The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982) and offered Young work as a composer. This was a student film, but its creators had succeeded in selling it to the distribution company New Image and it thus became Young’s “big” debut. This marked the start of his long and expansive career, though it also pigeonholed him as a horror composer, a label that he would bear for a long time to come.

Surrounded by cinematic horror and sci-fi trash

Between 1981 and 1987, Young was offered solely sci-fi trash movies such Def-Con 4 (1985), Barbarian Queen (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986). Not even a sequel to a horror hit, namely A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), would prove to be a turning point in his career. Full of hope, Young mobilized perhaps all of his friends from his school days and, for an inordinately small fee, assembled his largest orchestra up to that point, numbering forty musicians, to bring the score to life. Despite its commercial success, however, the resulting film was not received nearly as enthusiastically as its predecessor.

Two years later (specifically in 1987), Young received a commission under the name Hellraiser. This feature-length directorial debut of horror novelist Clive Barker initially seemed to be just another B-movie, but it ultimately turned out to be an innovative horror film with the parameters of a cult classic, for which Young composed the best and most monumental score of his career to date. He went in a completely different direction than his colleagues working in the horror genre, eschewing the usual orgy of synthesizers and the soulless, eerie creaking of a minimalist orchestra in favor of emotionally intense, painful and powerful music. Today, Young’s Hellraiser score ranks among the best works of horror film music alongside, for example, Goldsmith’s The Omen (1976) and Carpenter’s Halloween (1978).

From that moment, Young’s reputation as a horror composer was secure and only a few made-for-TV films gave him a diversion into lighter genres. However, he significantly reinforced his professional status and his commissions began to gain in quality. He received a Saturn Award (presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films) for the sequel to Hellraiser and subsequently worked on, for example, the sequel to The Fly (1989), the thrillers Flowers in the Attic (1987) and Jennifer 8 (1992), as well as The Dark Half (1993), based on the book of the same name by Stephen King. He made his first foray into the action genre with Rapid Fire (1992) and ventured into the hell of war in the heart of the Vietnamese jungle with Bat*21 (1988), in which his sorrowful, dramatic music underscored the stories of the American airmen played by Gene Hackman and Danny Glover. Another, not unremarkable work from that period was Czech emigrant Ivana Passer’s Haunted Summer (1988), which, despite not being a horror movie, touched on the genre, as it told of a meeting of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, who together went on to create the horror genre in the pages of their books.

Only those who take part can fail to win

1995 was a breakthrough year for Young, as that was when he first met his future faithful collaborator, direct Jon Amiel (on the thriller Copycat) and composed the music for the sci-fi hit Species. That same year, Young almost found himself on the list of Oscar nominees for his beautiful score for Murder in the First, which was supposed to have been released before Christmas in 1994 but ultimately had its premiere postponed to January 1995 due to production disagreements. This film of extraordinary quality lost its chance at Oscar glory and its disappointed director, Marc Rocco, did not make another film before dying prematurely fourteen years later. And Young himself had a bit of bad fortune with his remarkable choral music for the ambitious drama The Hurricane (1999) by the celebrated director Norman Jewison: “I love it... he captures the power and strength of what was happening on the screen,” a delighted Jewison said, commenting on Young’s work. Christopher again came up empty when that year’s Oscar nominations were announced, as the only nomination for The Hurricane went to Denzel Washington.

By 1999, Young had under his belt two more successful collaborations with Amiel (The Man Who Knew Too Little, 1997; Entrapment, 1998), the action movie Hard Rain (1998) and John Dahl’s Rounders (1998), in which he returned to his jazz roots. His name was no longer synonymous with horror-movie music, as he became a guarantee of quality in a broad range of genres. Thanks to the flexibility that he demonstrated with the additional alterations of Rounders, the then head of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, commissioned him to replace part of John Barry’s music in the drama Playing by Heart (1998). Norman Jewison then recommended Young to Curtis Hanson, who was seeking a replacement for the busy Jerry Goldsmith for his film Wonder Boys (2000), and Hanson in turn recommended him to Barry Levinson for Bandits (2001). At the turn of the century, Chris Young thus found himself on the list of the best Hollywood creators.

Dreams fulfilled and unattainable, and film music forever!

If, among the ranks of directors, Young had a clear favorite with whom he shared a feel for image and sound, it was Sam Raimi. For Young, Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) has always represented a flawless manifestation of pure visualism and madness, and he always longed to compose music for a film whose director consistently based his work on the coordination of those two elements. And thanks to the excessive workload of Raimi’s court composer, Danny Elfman, Young got the opportunity to do just that with the thriller The Gift (2000). Because he was involved in preparatory work on Spider-Man (2002), Raimi couldn’t be in the studio with Young and thus gave him a free hand. Young composed an impressive, piercing thriller score that even paid tribute to Elfman himself. When, several years later, Elfman decided not to work on Spider-Man 3 (2007), Young had become friends with Raimi and thus composed the music for one of the most expensive films ever made.

Young repeatedly validated his reputation as a reliable craftsman in the following years. His melodies adorned films in a diverse range of genres, such as the comic-book movie Ghost Rider (2007), the crime thriller Untraceable (2008), the psychological road movie Sleepwalking (2008), the Charles Darwin biopic Creation (2009), romantic films both very serious, like Love Happens (2009), and very unserious, namely When in Rome (2010), the bizarre The Rum Diary (2011), the sci-fi thriller Priest (2011), and even wild comedies like The Baytown Outlaws (2012) and A Madea Christmas (2013). And on top of that, he keeps coming back to horror. His more recent horror scores include those for Drag Me to Hell (2009), Sinister (2012), Scary or Die (2012), Deliver Us from Evil (2014), Pet Sematary (2019) and The Piper (2023).

Young has reconciled himself to the fact that he will probably never have the chance to collaborate with the filmmaking idols David Lynch, David Cronenberg or Joel and Ethan Coen (which of course is mainly due to the presence of Badalamenti, Shore and Burwell). But for all the modesty that courses through his veins, he will tell you with a smile on his face that, all things considered, all he needs to be happy is to have a long career and the opportunity to devote himself to composing film music forever. Though he does not and likely will not rank alongside the great Goldsmith and Williams, he has no problem with that, thanks to the nice position that he has achieved. The journey that he had to undertake in order to gain a sense of security took him decades. And he would sum up the recipe for success with this brief list of ingredients: a little talent, hard work and wanting it more than anything else.

Martin "POMO" Pomothy