Italian composer Fabio Frizzi began paying tribute to frequent collaborator Lucio Fulci with a live show titled Frizzi 2 Fulci in 2013, which paved the way for The Beyond: Composer’s Cut in 2022. Following its success, the maestro began working on a composer’s cut for another Fulci classic.
Zombie: Composer’s Cut features Frizzi’s reworked score to Fucli’s 1979 film performed live to a screening of the film, transforming a mere movie viewing into a concert experience. Currently touring the US, I ate up the performance at Sonia in Cambridge, MA on September 7.
The new soundtrack isn’t wall-to-wall music; Frizzi smartly opted to stay true to his original score — the oft-reprised prog rock main theme, the eerie synthesizer soundscapes, the tribal rhythms that evoke a voodoo curse — with some reinterpretation and expansion along the way. The music occasionally overpowers the dialogue, but Fulci often placed more importance on style than plot anyway.
Frizzi masterfully juggles keyboard, acoustic guitar, and conductor duties — sometimes all in the same song. He’s joined by guitarists Riccardo Rocchi and Francesco Saguto, bassist Roberto Fasciani, drummer Federico Tacchi, and keyboardist Paolo Castellani.
The music augments Zombie‘s many crowd-pleasing moments: decaying flesh eaters rising from the dead (and, in the film’s most notable scene, fighting a shark), Fulci’s signature eye trauma among other gnarly special effects, gratuitous nudity, and a fiery finale that gives way to a bleak conclusion on Brooklyn Bridge.
The live score is worth the price of admission alone, but Frizzi and his bandmates followed the screening with a 25-minute encore consisting of cues from other Fulci favorites, including City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, Cat in the Brain, and The Psychic.
Zombie: Composer’s Cut is on tour now. If you can’t make it to a show (or want to relive it), the new soundtrack is available on vinyl via Cadabra Records.
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