Above: Frank Moore and Marilyn Chambers in Rabid. Photo: Joel Sussman. New World Pictures / Photofest
Hypnotic, sinister, minimal, and with just a stuttered chill of sterile, sci-fi futurism—I've always thought Cronenberg got very lucky during his low-budget days to discover and license such a stylistically fitting track of stock library music for his 1977 horror production, Rabid. Still two years shy of the beginning of his incredibly fruitful, career-long collaboration with Howard Shore, Cronenberg eschewed the psychological complexities that those modernist scores would immediately imbue upon the unlucky characters of The Brood and beyond, and instead got a simple, repetitive track from KPM Music's in-house composer Brian Bennett which would become Rabid's leitmotif of growing paranoia amidst a virulent venereal apocalypse.
What you are listening to:
(1) Brian Bennett's "The Hideout" from KPM1157, The Hunter (Drama Suite) and Adventure Story
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Rabid plays Saturday, January 28 in New York at the Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective on David Cronenberg.