Bram Stoker's Dracula
Composer: Wojciech Kilar
Release date: November 24, 1992
Amazon users rating: 4,5/5 stars.
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All About Soundtracks Review:
Polish composer Wojciech Kilar was hired to score Francis Ford Copolla’s strange Bram Stoker’s Dracula and created a score that is darkly melancholic, but most of the time the darkness or the melancholy is more audible.
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Darkness is presented with low strings, blasting brass, militaristic percussion, and even a speaking choir. Dracula’s theme is somber and enigmatic (Dracula – The Beginning), reprised with feeling of danger in The Brides. Van Helsing also as a theme, more violent and militaristic, heard in the tracks Vampire Hunters, The Hunters Prelude and The Hunt Begins.
Melancholy comes in the form of the beautifully sinister love theme for Dracula and Mina. The use of a female vocal to introduce us to the theme is genial – Mina’s Photo is so attractive in its haunting lovely style, that you will get stuck in your head. Strings and woodwinds also come into the play for this theme, as you can hear in Love Remembered. But the development of the theme in Mina-Dracula and Love Eternal provides the greatest highlights of the album.
However, tracks like The Ring of Fire or Ascension make you feel like they were not supposed to be in this album. They’re completely unrelated to the rest of the score, and are unnecessary on album, just like the song by Annie Lenox, Love Song for a Vampire.
This score by Kilar combines horror and tragic love, and it’s mostly successful. When it has to be a horror score, it can be relatively good. But when it has to act like a gothic romantic score, it excels. Kilar’s love theme here is amazing, and it makes the two sides of the score more coherent, with this constant melancholic feeling.
As a whole, however, this score must be mostly appreciated for the style, mood and structure, because the themes are not properly memorable.
In the end of the day though, it’s a pretty recommendable score that inspired a lot of gothic romantic scores.
Ups: powerful, melancholic highlights for the love theme; inspiration for recent excelent gothic scores like Twilight Saga: New Moon or The Wolfman.
Downs: some tracks feel out of place and just break an otherwise fully entertaining listening experience.
Noteworthy tracks: Dracula - The Beginning, Mina's Photo, Love Remembered, Mina-Dracula, Love Eternal.
Score note: 7
Preview: Mina-Dracula
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