Siouxsie and the Banshees names the one “insanely frightening” horror soundtrack
It’s little surprise that horror film soundtracks would have played a formative role in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ body of work.
And not in a trite, ghoulish parody sense. Just like the goth tag does a massive disservice to the Banshees’ arresting and kaleidoscopic oeuvre, the silver screen’s horror scores name-checked by the band similarly dwell in a realm that’s infinitely more colourful, stirring, erotic, and psychedelic than the gloop of cliché-ridden orchestral galumphs that can clog even the most well-meaning cinema terror.
But even the classics make a showing. Legend has it that Siouxsie Sioux would instruct auditioning guitarists early in the Banshees’ tenure to mimic the London Philharmonic’s jabbing screeches that shrill against Norman Bates’ stabbing frenzy for Psycho’s infamous shower scene. If you listen to 1980’s ‘Happy House’, former Magazine guitarist John McGeoch seems to evoke Bernard Herrmann’s heightened peril just a touch on its eerily shimmering riff.
Founding member Steven Severin offered an insight into the horror canon he felt stood with the best. Speaking to Mojo, the Banshees bassist reeled off the likes of Goblin’s score for the original Suspiria, The Omen trilogy’s demonic conjuring courtesy of Jerry Goldsmith, and Popol Vuh’s haunting shroud that follows Count Dracula in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. Yet, one key work stuck in Severin’s mind as possessing truly dark, transportive energy, that of David Lynch’s theatrical debut, Eraserhead.
“It’s not really horror and it’s not really a score, but it is insanely frightening,” Severin confessed. “Sound designer Alan Splet and director David Lynch himself conjure a claustrophobic, steaming industrial world of sexual anxiety that rattles and hums inside and outside poor protagonist Henry Spencer’s head”.
He added, “Imagine a Martian let loose to experiment in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and you are still nowhere near the sheer, eerie otherness of this 1977 audio nightmare. The ‘baby’ screams incessantly and the lady in the radiator sings, ‘In heaven, everything will be fine,’ and I, for the duration of the movie, want to believe her”.
Lynch would oversee a string of dazzling slices of dark surrealism, lifting the weird, psychic veil of his beloved Americana and small-town suburbia, but no entry in his filmography plumbs such a depth of visceral, nightmarish sting as Eraserhead.
Matching its dilapidated, barren world of deformed infants and seemingly alive roast chickens is Lynch and Splet’s swallowing soundscape. Drenching the monochrome visions in a near-perennial crust of white noise and caustic buzz, Spencer’s lonely and alienated traverse around a phantasmic Philadelphia is ingeniously breathed, twisted, and aural life. It’s what gives Eraserhead its atmosphere, a constant gristly howl banging against the factory windows in seeming tandem with the sickly, mewling infant radiating dark and troubled dreams in the tiny apartment.
It’s an extraordinary movie that prompts all kinds of fan dissections, just as any great Lynch movie should. Along with the angular upsweep hairdo and lady in the radiator, Eraserhead’s most memorable feature overwhelmingly lies in Lynch and Splet’s arresting sonic pummel that courses throughout the weird trip.
