Latest Release
- 25 OCT 2024
- 29 Songs
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2024
Essential Albums
- Danny Elfman's seductively macabre song-score is a musical romp. Marilyn Manson and Panic! At the Disco transform "This Is Halloween" into a brooding industrial show-stopper and ambitious, operatic neo-prog pop, respectively, while Fiona Apple casts "Sally's Song" as compelling ambient-meets-chamber group cabaret. She Wants Revenge gives "Kidnap the Sandy Claws" a considerably darker, electronica-suffused edge.
- Danny Elfman’s first scores for Tim Burton, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, had established the former Oingo Boingo leader as a specialist in an akimbo style that many audience members—not to mention several Hollywood execs—would likely describe as “weird”. But his work on Burton’s smash Batman put him in a rarer class. He could still play the freak (“Kitchen, Surgery, Face Off”, “The Joker’s Poem”), but he also seemed to take the prospect of scoring an action movie seriously (“The Batman Theme”, “Attack of the Batwing”). And while there have been dozens of movies in the franchise since, it’s important to remember that most audiences in 1989 would have thought of Batman as your regular American superhero: Violent when necessary, but always in the right. Inspired by graphic novels like The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns, Burton and Elfman instead evoked something more like an anti-hero: Troubled, vengeful, haunted by an internal dissonance he can’t quite resolve (“Childhood Remembered”). A twisted portrait, no doubt, but one that gave the superhero figure a moral complexity and sense of depth it didn’t quite have before. It’s natural to root for the good guy. But it’s more fun when he’s a little bit bad.
- Though Beetlejuice’s most recognisable musical cues will always be Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” and “Jump in the Line”, the movie wouldn’t have been what it was without Danny Elfman’s score. While Elfman’s work on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure had been manic and idiosyncratic , his Beetlejuice work was more out-and-out dark, combining Burton and Elfman’s sense of camp with a shared love of 1960s-era horror. Elfman had scored four more movies in the years between Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, and you can hear a sense of progress and adjustment in his expanded palette: There are shades of Eastern European folk (“The Book! / Obituaries”, “End Credits”) and eerie science-fiction music (“The Incantation”); a stab at sweet Broadway show tunes (“The Aftermath”); and moments of pure, clanging dissonance (“The Wedding”). Elfman later said that part of the challenge in scoring the film was that its titular character—the misanthropic ghost Betelgeuse—doesn’t show up for almost half an hour. That meant that, in a way, Elfman was responsible for letting the audience know what weirdness was in store—a feat he pulls off in the opening credits (“Main Titles”).
Music Videos
Artist Playlists
- ‘80s pop star turned go-to whimsical composer.
- The composer’s fans conjure their own blends of menace and mischief.
Singles & EPs
Compilations
About Danny Elfman
Danny Elfman is a composer and the former frontman of New Wave band Oingo Boingo. ∙ When he was 18, he visited his brother in France, where he joined a musical theater troupe, playing the violin as a street performer. ∙ In the ’80s and early ’90s, he fronted Oingo Boingo, a new wave band evolved from Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, a quirky cabaret group for which he was the musical director. ∙ Elfman scored his first film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the same year that Oingo Boingo had their first big hit—“Weird Science,” from the movie of the same name. ∙ His Emmy-nominated theme song for The Simpsons was approved to be recorded the same day that he composed and demoed the tune. ∙ Elfman has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including twice in the Best Original Score category. ∙ He has worked on music for 17 Tim Burton films, resulting in a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition (“The Batman Theme”) and three Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Score. ∙ In addition to his TV and movie soundtrack work, Elfman has composed a full percussion concerto for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. ∙ Just in time for Halloween in 2020, Elfman released “Happy,” his first non-score solo single in 36 years.
- BORN
- 1953
- GENRE
- Soundtrack