Search - Nicholas Pike :: Fear Dot Com (Score)

A horror film whose topicality is tied to the dot-com boom is asking for trouble, and sure enough William Malone's follow-on to House on Haunted Hill turned out to be something of a murky bust. But composer Nicholas Pike's smartly understated score certainly deserves a better hearing. Working from inspirations as diverse as brooding Russian classical motifs, the baroque, and 20th-century modernism, Pike serves up a subtle cocktail of creepiness. On the cues "Alistair Gets Cozy/Cozier," he playfully turns the horror-film clichés of creaking hinges, leaden footsteps, and squeaking doors into wry mini-concertos of dread. There are a few obligatory crashing crescendos, wailing choirs, and action cues in the composer's largely seamless melding of the orchestral and electronic, but overall it's a soundtrack that wisely relies more on spacious dynamics than on cheap jolts to paint its evocative soundscape of dread. --Jerry McCulley