Henry Mancini – Fear (2013)

Following its landmark reissue of his score to Vittorio De Sica’s doomed romance Sunflower, Quartet Records issued the first-ever soundtrack album to one of Henry Mancini’s final projects: director Rockne S. O’Bannon’s 1990 thriller Fear.
Ally Sheedy, Lauren Hutton and Michael O’Keefe starred in writer-director O’Bannon’s psychological thriller about a psychic investigator whose special gift can connect her to murderers even as they commit their crimes. She’s semi-retired when she’s contacted by a killer with psychic powers of his own. Soon, a cat-and-mouse game ensues which leads the two to a climactic showdown in a Hall of Mirrors where she must face not only the killer but her own fear. Henry Mancini was no stranger to such dark territory, having crafted intense scores for films like Experiment in Terror, Wait Until Dark and The Night Visitor. In a sense, too, Fear was a spiritual heir to Mancini’s rejected score to Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, another spine-tingling chiller. The composer combined tense, evocative cues with electronic touches and even some of his trademark musical humor for Fear, but the score was almost never heard. A soundtrack album was scrapped when the film didn’t premiere in cinemas, and only “Casey’s Theme” appeared on CD, re-recorded as part of the RCA album Mancini in Surround. Quartet’s 1000-unit limited edition presents the entire original score plus source music for nearly 65 minutes of late-career Mancini, still in full control of his considerable scoring powers.