CD
Jazz musician and psychiatrist Denny Zeitlin composed his sole film score for Phil Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he seems to have tried to pack a number of different styles into one. There is, of course, the ominous orchestral music typical of a horror movie. Then, too, there are small-band jazz passages that sound more typical of the composer. Some cues are played on a synthesizer. And there are moments that recall 20th century avant-garde classical music in its atonality and affection for found sounds. This last style dovetails with an unusual aspect of the score, that portions of it seem to have been integrated with the movie's sound effects to the extent that it is sometimes hard to sort out the composer from the Foley artist (the film term for the technician who adds footsteps, closing doors, and other "source" sounds to a soundtrack). Certainly, this is one of those scores that works better with the film itself than it does on its own as a soundtrack album. On the CD reissue released by Perseverance Records, 25 years after the fact, a 32-minute interview with Zeitlin has been added. His remarks sound at least rehearsed, if not actually written beforehand, but he gives a good sense of how he came to do the score, what it was like working on it, and why, despite the generally pleasant experience, he has never agreed to do another one (in the main, he found it too time-consuming). William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide