It's about time Christopher Young scored a horror movie.  He hasn't done nearly enough of them.  That was a lame excuse at humour.  Of course, in reality he has done approximately twelve thousand of them.  He's done it all - from the subtle chills of The Glass House through to the enormous gothic out-and-out horror of Hellraiser 2 (still probably his most fondly-regarded score, despite all the great ones he's written in the years since).  The prospect of hearing a new horror score from Young is always a welcome one; after the slightly disappointing The Grudge, it was interesting to speculate which direction he might turn for The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a film which seems to have better actors in that one might expect (what Tom Wilkinson is doing here is anyone's guess - maybe he had a large mortgage payment due).  The answer is that he has gone for pure chills, crafting a subtle but extremely complex score in the process.

It begins somewhat innocuously, with a female vocalist (don't worry, there's not a hint of the Middle East about Sara Niemetz's performance) emerging from a wash of synths in ethereally beautiful fashion.  After this, Young conjures up an amazingly tense atmosphere, with a piano solo forever working its way around the subtle string passages; all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose with the deeply unsettling "First Possession", with Young using all the skills he's picked up over the years to great effect, with the piercingly sharp strings alternating with softer passages where you just know something is around the corner but aren't sure when it's coming.  Young focuses almost exclusively on strings, piano, percussion, synths and the vocalist, often using several different recordings of the latter at the same time to create the impression of a wider force of voices.

After "First Possession" comes "Second Possession" and then "Third Possession" and I have to interject normal service here by complaining in the strongest possible terms about the track titles - I wonder whether Young hit an obstacle as he has before when trying to use his typically off-the-wall, ludicrous titles and so retaliated (again, as he has before) by offering up deliberately bland ones instead.  Still, it's the music that matters and here the composer continues to deliver.  It is music designed to scare, and it succeeds in no uncertain terms.  It is genuinely creepy and unsettling, with Young offering traditional tonal music only right at the very end of the album.  (Check out "The Exorcism" for one of the most oustanding pieces of horror music you'll ever hear, with young holding nothing back but still never simply resorting to the orchestra just playing very loudly - it's magnificently-wrought music.)  To that end, it probably won't have enormously wide appeal, but it is simply leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of music written for horror films today.  If I were to have a complaint it's that the album is probably a little on the long side, but nevertheless it works tremendously well, with Young offering a classy and complex score to a film in which most people probably wouldn't expect to find one.  It's not the kind of slasher score many might have hoped for, but is far subtler than that, coming off rather well because of it if you ask me.  Some people will no doubt listen to the album and dismiss it because it's rather challenging music, but it's the sort of album where, if the listener takes the time to really give it a chance, it has an awful lot to offer in return.