MRH: I think for Trick ‘R Trick, Douglas’ music has an elegant, sweeping quality, and some subtle allusions to Bernard Herrmann, but there’s also a really lovely use of children’s voices, which is a nice tie-in to the children that died on the bus, as well as the overall nature of Halloween (that it’s primarily for kids), and the grim qualities that kids play with because the season offers things that are funny and frightening.

Douglas Pipes: Hopefully the score speaks to the Halloweens you’ve experienced throughout: from being a kid to being a young adult, and all the fun times you’ve had on Halloween; they’re so well presented in the film that the score makes sense of the experience.

MRH: The soundtrack album is quite long (it’s a good solid hour) and it’s nice to see a film where, as Michael mentioned, the composer basically had an entire film to play with.  There weren’t a lot of source songs that got in the way, which is one of the problems (and clichés) in some of the eighties films: you have music montages and the songs date the films, whereas Douglas’ music gives Trick R Trick a genuinely timeless quality because it’s not affected by music styles that have come and gone.

Douglas Pipes: I think that’s what in our earliest conversations we wanted the function of the music to do. It was that ‘Why can we watch Poltergeist and not know that it didn’t come out yesterday?’

Michael Doughtery: It’s funny about that because there are a lot of theatres in L.A. which will do these cool revival screenings. The Arc Light recently showed Poltergeist, and I’ll never forget this moment where I walk into Poltergeist, and it’s completely sold out – every seat is taken – and it’s six o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon or something… Just out of curiosity I walked across the hall to see how this big, giant, $180 million dollar summer tent-pole movie was doing (the movie shall remain nameless), and I walk in, and it’s the middle of the screening, and there’s like eight people there.

It’s not like Poltergeist was competing directly with it; it’s just clearly that film still has a following to this day, it has an appeal, and a big part of it is the score, because I’ve always heard that people were very nervous about that movie until Goldsmith wrote that score.

What movies being made now, what scores being written now, are going to have that same strength and that same appeal two decades from now?

MRH: One of the things Douglas was able to draw from was the extraordinary visual design in Trick ‘R Trick, and I imagine the striking compositions, editing, and tones gave him strong ideas, as well as such effective themes for the film.

Douglas Pipes: Absolutely. As one of the last players to come in on the process, [Michael’s] goal was to make a classic Halloween movie that people would pull out every Halloween.

The cinematography’s amazing, the set design’s amazing, the actors are great, the script is sharp, and then it comes down to the music. Again, with our conversations [we asked ourselves] ‘How do we make the music hold up to all these other fine elements?’ They were definitely inspirational. The colours of the orchestra make sense with all the autumnal colours, and the dark colours [are] something that the orchestra does so much better than electronic things.