Graeme Revell's film-scoring career got off to a powerful start with the thriller "Dead Calm" starring Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill. Another early success was "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle". The film doesn't have a lot of music, but it supports the film well with touches of domesticity and moments of Hitchcockian suspense. The movie's main theme is based on a Gilbert & Sullivan song ("Poor Wand'ring One" from "Pirates of Penzance") since the man of the house likes to listen to Gilbert and Sullivan music. Both these films established a key genre for Graeme Revell, since many of his subsequent films can be placed on the spectrum between Thriller and Horror, with touches of Dark Sci-Fi or Fantasy. Soon afterwards he scored the sci-fi horror "Spontaneous Combustion" and the horror "Child's Play 2". The original "Child's Play" was scored by Joe Renzetti, but Revell was to return to the franchise for "Bride of Chucky". Other film series have also helped to propel his career, especially "The Crow" and the later "The Crow: City of Angels", and he also got the composer job for the crossover movie "Freddy vs. Jason".
In 1996 Graeme Revell worked with director Robert Rodriguez in the vampire movie "From Dusk Till Dawn", and he was to work with the director again when he co-scored the stylish comic-book movie "Sin City" along with fellow composer John Debney. Revell was associated with Robert Rodriguez once more when he supplied "additional music" for the "Planet Terror" segment of "Grindhouse". In 2005 Revell had the opportunity to follow in another director's footsteps when he scored remakes of John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13" and "The Fog". The original movies were scored by John Carpenter himself. Revell has also had some involvement with television. He created a suitably epic score for the three-part mini series Dune based on the Frank Herbert novels, and more recently he has worked on "CSI: Miami", "Eleventh Hour", "The Forgotten", "Dark Blue" and "The River".
See also our article Tortured Souls: Gothic Music in Horror which discusses 2 Graeme Revell soundtracks "The Crow" and "Bride of Chucky".
Several Graeme Revell scores are widely available (either on CD or for download), and we suggest the following films as a good place to start:
Here are some CD covers signed by Graeme Revell. Our thanks to Petr Kocanda for permission to use his collection of autographed CDs. Click on any thumbnail to see a full size version of the image in a separate window.
mfiles home