Outmusic and Stonewall Society award-winning musician Robert Urban continues to expand his palette and has written another film score, this time for the gay horror film Zombies. Zombies tells the story of Christian (Jonathan Williams), a young zombie with, well, a body to die for, who is under the spell of alpha zombie Samuel (Jason Hoffman). Jealous zombie Cain (Creed Bowlen) sets out to make Christian’s after-life a living hell by stirring up his murderous memories. Jonathan also finds himself conflicted over the secret he is keeping from slutty best friend Jason (Eric Turic) and his attraction to fellow zombie Matthew (Draven Gonzalez who also wrote the Zombies screenplay).

AE: Do you have a favorite horror movie soundtrack?
RU: Perhaps Jerry Goldsmith's unnervingly calm soundtrack for the 1979 Alien. I also love Dominic Frontiere's ominous "20th Century" style music for 1960's TV horror show Outer Limits.

AE: What is the first movie score or soundtrack that you remember making an impression on you?
RU: As a very young child, I watched a lot of old movies on television. Maybe it was a gay thing, as I'd prefer coming home after school to watch television rather than to play baseball with other boys, etc. There was a day-time show in the NYC area called Million Dollar Movie, which would run old Hollywood classic films--the same movie would run once a day, and twice on Saturdays, for a whole week.

Thus, for example, I would watch something like the Marlene Dietrich's Shanghai Express or the original King Kong up to eight times in a week. Naturally, with so much repetition, both the films' images AND their music really burned into my child(hood) consciousness. Again, the score to the 1933 King Kong sticks out as one of my earliest film score memories--it was, and still remains, a special favorite of mine.

As for going to movie theaters as a little boy, the classical score to Walt Disney's Fantasia will forever be with me. And I must mention, seeing and hearing the Beatles' Hard Days Night as a kid changed me forever. Having spent my whole life as a rock musician, it was probably the closest thing to a true religious experience I've ever had, the effect was that profound. Even today when I watch that film, it seems as fresh as the first time I saw it. Such wonderful songs.

AE: Are there other film score composers whose work you admire?
RU: I really like Danny Elfman's work (Batman, Edward Scissorhands, et al). He's like a modern day Haydn, such clean, crisp simple "to the point" writing. Plus, like me, he has rock origins. I'm not crazy about a lot of the films he composes for--except perhaps Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which was pure genius--but Elfman's work just gets better and better every time I hear it.

AE: Tell us something about the process of composing music for films.
RU: First off, composing for films, especially horror films, gave me the chance to discover something in myself I didn't previously know: a talent for creating dark, disturbingly scary music. It's an exciting challenge to find it in oneself to create the sonic accompaniment-- in a sense the sonic counterpart--to murder, horror, and all things ghastly. In composing for film, one gets a chance to stretch out and use music for both subtle and deep psychological introspections and expressions of the profound, which one doesn't get to do much in pop.

There is great satisfaction when the composed music is placed exactly right in a scene, and when seen and heard together for the first time, it makes what's up on the screen "ring true." Music has the power to change anything and everything in a film. It can convey important things to the audience faster, and often better, than spoken dialogue, and is key to any type of non-speaking scene.

Producers and I have noted (often amusingly) how when we first screen a film without the music, some performances might seem weak, stilted, fake. Then we'll notice how those same performances can come alive and become genuine once the music is behind it. Music in film can actually change our own perception of the quality of acting, turning what we thought was a lousy actor into a brilliant star.

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