Various Artists - Dream House (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Soundtracks - CD

Horror movie music can often be as predictable as the stories themselves, but composer John Debney manages to both celebrate and liberate the horror score with his work on director Jim Sheridan's haunted house thriller Dream House. Beginning appropriately with a ghostly, wordless female vocal, Debney dutifully ramps up the Halloween cliches (dissonant string bursts, twinkling piano, plaintive choral sections), but wedged between all of the spook house mechanics are some lovely moments of pure fantasy that bring to mind James Horner's dark yet ultimately warm and autumnal work on 1983's Something Wicked This Way Comes. ~ James Christopher Monger, Rovi