“I have been an admirer of Jerry Goldsmith from the moment I heard his score for The Blue Max and A Patch of Blue. Along with John Williams, these two men have dominated the arena of great movie music for nearly 20 years. Jerry’s scores range from the unforgettable Patton to his Oscar-winning music for The Omen. In between, there came such rousing challenges as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Great Train Robbery, Chinatown, Papillon, Alien, over 100 scores.

Now with Poltergeist, Jerry has met his greatest challenge- to scare us nearly to tears, and he has been remarkable in his efforts. Cleverly, the moments of greatest tension arise not from his brilliant off-rhythm ostinatos but more from a soothing tonal beauty.

Don’t trust his melodies. Something perfectly unworldly is due to occur the moment you let your guard drop and Goldsmith proceeds to feign and attack with no “apparent” rhyme or pattern. It’s to his great credit that he has plotted every blow and designed a score of such shattering intensity that nighttime is perhaps not the right time to hear this album if you have seen the film. If you haven’t seen Poltergeist, Jerry’s music conjures many classical impressions of ferocious drive and at the same time, cathedral beauty. So…. let the imagination wander. Pleasant dreams.

-Steven Spielberg”

“Poltergeist is not a horror pictures. Poltergeist is a love story. A scary love story.”

-Jerry Goldsmith”

In an interview with Cinema Score, Jerry Goldsmith spoke about how he got the job.

“Steven Spielberg called me about five months before it went into production and wanted to know if I would be interested in doing it. He’d long been an admirer of mine, and we had met several times. I said I’d be very interested, so he sent me a script and I loved it. I was very excited about being involved with anything with Spielberg, anyway. “

Jerry Goldsmith would work closely with Spielberg during the creation of the score.

“With Spielberg, probably more than any other director, there’s a tremendous amount of discussion. He’s very articulate about music, and one can discuss for hours about approaches. Anything I did was not on my own volition; it was a joint effort in that we both agreed what we were trying to do with the music for the picture. We wanted a childlike theme for the little girl; Spielberg felt that much of the action in the closet should have a quasi-religious atmosphere to it. There was something definitely non-human about it, yet it was not evil all the way. It was discussing specifics like that which resulted in our approach. “

 

Because of all the effects in the film, Spielberg had give Goldsmith an extremely vivid description of what the audience was going to be seeing, but it wasn’t until the score was finished that much of the effects footage started rolling in. In some cases, the cues were actually longer than the scene was. Goldsmith spoke of one scene in particular:

“The sequence where the Victorian ghost comes down the stairs was originally blocked to be twice as long. If you hear the album and see the picture you’ll see where it had to be cut for the picture. When the effects came in, there were only half as much of them.“

Arthur Morton worked as the orchestrator of the score. Morton once described their collaborations in a simple manor, “I take the music from the yellow paper and put it on the white paper.” Goldsmith and Morton had been working together since Take Her She’s Mine and would do so until LA Confidential, a score he went uncredited on.

“The idea is to try to get the suspense yet also get the emotion. And I always felt that the emotion…the love was more important than the suspense.”

Goldsmith reflecting upon his score:

“The dramatic content dictates the nature of the music. I’ve done a lot of horror and supernatural pictures, but I don’t consider Poltergeist a horror story at all. It’s an old fashioned ghost story, and there’s only one horrifying moment in it, which is very brief. “

You could call Jerry Goldsmith’s Poltergeist score a “musical description of the film.” Like the film itself, it is a brilliant mixture of “fear,” “fantasy,” and “wonder,” three words that you’ll probably see a lot in this article. There are musical hints throughout the earlier scenes of the movie that this is all too good to be true and that really there is something wicked is lurking about. And it isn’t too long before it shows itself.

The score switches out the “quaint and bittersweat” melodies for a “calm, but twisted” approach. As the film starts to utilize childhood fears, such as clowns and scary looking trees, the score starts to play with around with those fears, letting us know that there is a reason to fear the things that often turn out to be nothing at all.

During the abduction scene, we are given an exciting, loud, and suspensful peice.  In the second act, the fantasy element is taken up a notch until it’s reaches a high point during the rescue scene. After that,  it is given a more twisted than ever character trait, as much of the “wonder” is replaced with harsh, loud, suspenseful cues, which eventually drown out, letting us know that the whole ordeal is over as we are once again treated to Carol Anne’s theme, this time with childrens’ voices humming along.