2026 October 30 • Friday

The Halloween spirit can be found anywhere! Consider this Skin Diver magazine from October 1972 with both the Loch Ness Monster and a "Graveyard of Bones" on its cover!

The graveyard of bones isn't quite as Shocktober as you might expect, concerning a sunken ship whose "cargo of horse and cattle bones was on its way from Trinidad to Baltimore to be made into bone meal fertilizer".

The ship sank after colliding with Anegada reef and lots of the bones are still there on the ocean floor. "Easily recognizable were large animal jaw bones with teeth still intact. I spotted an occasional vertebra, but the majority of the bones were rib and leg bones."

The Loch Ness article is more intriguing, with the exploring sub running into anything without warning or later explanation.

"Later, on the surface, we found in the working parts of the arm pieces of shattered sedimentary rock similar to sandstone. This does not explain why we registered clear water beneath us and the peculiar nature of the sound. When you hit rock, you know it because of the dull thud it gives. But this was a definite metallic crash. Not only did the sonar register nothing beneath or around us, but we could not see anything either, even with very careful maneuvering and our high-powered lights.".

Nessie lives!

2026 October 26 • Monday

For the 925th Soundtrack of the Week we've got The Golden Age of Horror Vol. 1, which contains music from three films scored by Elisabeth Lutyens: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, The Skull and Paranoiac.

It starts with "Main Title/Strangers on a Train" from Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, which combines some Herrmannesque atmosphere with some unusual avantgarde guitar playing.

An Americana sound that would fit perfectly into any number of Westerns opens "The Werewolf", but this quickly switches over to eerie and dreadful underscore.

Another airy and sunny opening starts off "The Creeping Vine" before this, too, becomes a cue with interesting horror sonorities, as well as some melancholy themes. Lutyens gets a lot out of a small ensemble here, blending strings and percussion in novel and exciting ways.

The "Voodoo" track is all percussion, for instance, but elsewhere she'll blend in wood blocks or vibes or other difficult to identify percussion instruments with the strings and reeds.

"End of the Line" is also Herrmannesque in ways and very effective.

After the Dr. Terror's House of Horrors cues comes a selection from The Skull. The "Main Title" for this one is much more energetic and urgent, jumping out at the listener immediately and again with some unusual sounds, possibly a cymbalom or the inside of a piano.

"Auction Purchase" uses snare drum at first and then strings as a rhythmic foundation, which is continued in the beginning of "The book of the Marquis de Sade" before Lutyens lets them drop out for a feeling of emptiness, after which the strings return.

The strings dwell in high frequencies while double bass picks out some low tones amidst more evocative and fresh-sounding percussion and reed figures in "The Dealer's Nightmare", which also has some impressive dissonances.

Nobody writes music like this anymore. Could anybody even do it? "Theft" is perhaps the most Herrmann-like cue on the CD, with its ostinati and monomaniacal looped phrases.

For Paranoiac Lutyens gets more out of the flute for a lighter and brigher sound for the "Main Title" and then contrasts strings with church organ in a dissonant way for "Suspicion".

The romanticism of the strings is set against an obsessive percussive pulse in "A Discovery of Horror" whilte "Fiery Finale" brings back the organ for a subdued beginning before ramping up the intensity.

2026 October 19 • Monday

Remember Don't Look Now? I just watched it again, having forgot most of it besides the beginning and the end. The music by Pino Donaggio is crucial to the movie and also the 924th Soundtrack of the Week!

Donaggio's score has a few themes winding through it. "Laura's Theme", for example, also called "I Colori di Dicembere", gets a vocal version, a flute and strings version, a piano and guitar version and a final climactic arrangement with church organ.

Then there's "John's Theme", a childlike melody usually expressed with piano but also given a string arrangement.

There are some nice, Herrmann-influenced uses of strings, in "Christine Is Dead" and "Through the Streets of Venice", as well as some more modern-sounding figures for orchestra in "Strange Happenings" and "Laura Comes Back".

This is one Donaggio's best scores and is perfectly melded with what you see on the screen. Now my homework is to read or perhaps re-read the Daphne du Maurier short story that it's based on.
2026 October 16 • Friday

A year after launching their regular UFO column, Man to Man magazine came up with a Red Scare angle. Indeed, they actually use the phrase “UFO gap”.

As usual, there isn’t much salient information but there are some nice photos.

The main concerns are that the USSR has already made first contact with extraterrestrials or that they have merely solved the UFO mystery and the explanation is “unstartling”.

2026 October 14 • Wednesday

Another men's magazine, Man to Man magazine, started a UFO department with their January 1967 number.

They invite readers to write in with their UFO encounter stories and get started with a classic sighting, complete with some wonderful photos that have been used in some UFO documentaries.

In charge of this new regular feature is a "Long Island businessman" who has lectured on UFOs and made their study a "life-time hobby". He doesn't use his real name but goes by the delightful pseudonym Mercator Saturnus Player.

Carl Jung gets a quote here, but it's not his famous remark about UFOs being a manifestation of a collective unconscious but about how the authorities should reveal what they know about the subject.

2026 October 12 • Monday

Rupert Hine's incredible electronic score for The Shout is the 923rd Soundtrack of the Week.

There's a lot of cues here and a lot of variety of sounds. It can be spacey or kind of electropop-computer. It can be total dread ambience or even be sound effects for the film. There are also some musique concrète pieces.

Long and thick synth tones form a background for airier, flute-like synth lines in "My Wife Is Waiting for Me", for isntance, while much of "Trapped" sounds like an amplified and angry fly.

What sounds like recordings of tortured human breathing start off the title track, which explodes into a howl of sonic intensity.

"Bass Drone" is like a stripped down Vangelis Blade Runner cue while "CS80 Strings" is sunny and angelic-sounding.

Real church organ dominates "Harry's Funeral" and then "EMS seq1" is a straight sci-fi loop with keening synth notes.

There's a whole track of ring modulator ideas and some unsettling mixes of different instruments and sources, such as in "Tailcoated Shaman".

It's all pretty amazing.
2026 October 09 • Friday

When was the real golden age of UFOs in the US? The 1950s, maybe, but I think they were still going strong in the '60s. They certainly became staples of men's magazines of that decade. Here is, for our first example, the December, 1969, issue of Saga magazine, with "Worldwide UFO Maneuvers" on its cover.

The article itself is a collection of anecdotes of the familiar "someone saw a UFO and then something strange happened" variety. Power failures, heat waves, cars going out of control, humanoid figures wearing what appear to be diving suits and using hand-held paralysis rayguns on people.

Nothing in here is verifiable or even sourced, beyond vague citations such as "Australian Flying Review", with no date or issue number. (This was probably supposed to be Australian Flying Saucer Review.)

But it's a bunch of names, places and dates and typical UFO encounter stuff, all inconclusive, all pretty typical, all easy to invent. Once you've read a bunch of these, it seems like it would be pretty easy to make them up.

And even if UFOs still had traction in the '60s, by 1969 it might have been pretty played out. This UFO article here gets bottom billing, after Ann-Margret and Snowmobile Ski-chuting. (Surfing was kind of played out by then too.)

In the back there's one of those body-building ads that were very common in magazine and comics for decades. But this one features "movie and T.V. star" Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though his first movie did not, I believe, come out until 1970 (though only a couple of months after this magazine's cover date).

2026 October 05 • Monday

The 922nd Soundtrack of the Week, and the first 2026 Shocktober selection, is Don Peake's music for The Hills Have Eyes.

This has to be one of the best examples of using a little to get a lot. There's a piano, a synthesizer, some percussion and some strings and that's pretty much it.

Most of the cues rely on the piano and synth to create moods of dread and terror, with strings and percussion added for extra effect as needed.

It balances texture and atmosphere with some urgent driving moods. Somewhere in "Stealing The Baby/Lynne Is Shot/RV Fight/Finding The Walkie Talkie" a drum kit playing a rock beat comes out of nowhere and the synth gets to groove for a while.

A similar surprise rock/funk idiom appearance comes in "Ruby Runs With Baby/The Rabbit/Brenda Sees Mutant/Dead Mom Decoy". There aren't a ton of swinging parts in this score but when they happen, they're great.

This release includes some alternate versions of those as well as wind sounds created by synth, some axe hit stings and a couple of tracks of just percussion.

"Criminal" by Public Image Ltd. changes the feel entirely by keeping some of the rock elements but steering the music into a sparer, jagged, not funky but not exactly not not funky either place..

I don't really remember that song or the next one, "So Long Cowboy" by Westworld. Time to watch the movie again!

The last song on the record Sheryl Crow's "Hundreds of Tears", which has an appropriate dramatic and emotional feel to it.