Perhaps the most notable bit of trivia about The Hateful Eight—that has nothing to do with the script—is that it was the first Quentin Tarantino film that featured an original score. With the director's first two features, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, he favored using rock and roll tracks that played on the radios or loudspeakers that the characters were listening to. Many of these needle drop moments were instantly iconic, such as the "Stuck in the Middle with You" torture scene in Dogs and the getting-ready-for-a-party confusion of heroin for cocaine scene from Fiction set to "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon".
Post-Fiction, as Tarantino—who received massive acclaim as a writer—began to grow as a director he not only started to use more camera angles and less pulpy lighting but he also started to overlay compositional scores on top of his films, not just music that his characters were listening to. However, although he was working hand in hand with the lenser of his new visual language (Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson has filmed every Tarantino film Kill Bill onward), Tarantino wasn't using a composer, instead he selected bits from previous film scores to "score" his films.
Tarantino's favorite record crates to pull from are 1960s-70s Italian giallo (slasher) films, blaxploitation flicks, American b-movies and spaghetti Westerns. There is a common theme with the sounds of these era-specific genres, so let's toss aside an accusation that they're chosen for their obscurity, as Tarantino has never been shy about tipping his hat to his influences. No, instead of sweeping sentimental scores that many are used to, these genres of films favored guitar arrangements for their strings, whistles for their winds and a little distortion for their production value.
The very fact that Tarantino was using a film score to dictate the pace of a scene—as opposed to the characters pushing play on a cool song and cutting loose—shows his growth as a director; he needed to find moments in editing to get the response he wanted, as opposed to writing the energy he wanted directly into the script which strips away the room for potential editing. His first foray into cherry-picking scores was a bit obvious, using music from Pam Grier's blaxploitation films for the score to his celluloid statue built to Grier, Jackie Brown. Afterward, the Kill Bill films showed an increased awareness of accompaniment of tracks to match the action and seamless editing, but it wasn't until Tarantino began setting his films in the past that he started to explore the idea of having a consistent sounding score throughout.
Ennio Morricone's (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) composition for The Hateful Eight is quite evocative and quite possibly the best score of 2015. Morricone's score perfectly melds with previous score selections Tarantino had chosen in editing his previous films, so perhaps this is a hint to the director that his desired sound can be achieved organically with his input.
While I applaud Morricone's score, I'd like to single out some of the perfect score selections that Tarantino chose that might've assisted his ability to identify what he'd want from his first original score. As The Hateful Eight is advertised as Tarantino's eighth standalone film (which doesn't count Death Proof and Four Rooms), I've added some honorable mentions in a playlist of all tracks (including a few songs that were written for movie soundtracks)—at the very bottom of this list.
[Correction: Tarantino counts Kill Bill as one movie and also counts Death Proof, that's how he comes to eight. However, the playlist and write-ups below still remain awesome]
"The Devil's Rumble" from 'Devil's Angels' (1967)
Performed by: David Allan and The Arrows
Appears in: Inglourious Basterds
Devil's Angels is a low-budget biker movie where the Hell's Angels strike a deal with a town's sheriff, but the peace can't be kept within their own ranks and a battle breaks out. Sound a little familiar to Shohanna's (Melanie Laurent) position and pact in Basterds? Allan and The Arrows are surf rockers whose inclusion recalls Tarantino's lovely credit use of "Surf Rider" for the opening credits to Pulp Fiction and this track plays when Lt. Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt) "Plan B" begins to take shape.
"Twisted Nerve" from 'Twisted Nerve' (1968)
Orchestrated by: Bernard Hermann
Appears in: Kill Bill, Vol. 1
Hermann is one of the most influential composers of all time, responsible for the shower curtain screech and duh-duh drain of Psycho; this sparse, lullaby moment from Twisted Nerve is creepy as hell and pushes movement as opposed to a sudden horrific death. Tarantino uses the theme music as Elle Driver's (Darryl Hannah) theme, whistling it as she walks down the hospital hallway before ducking into a closet to fill a syringe with something deadly, at which point Hermann's composition continues.
"Escape" by Roy Ayers from 'Coffy' (1973)
Orchestrated by: Roy Ayers
Appears in: Jackie Brown
As mentioned in the intro, it was an easy choice to pepper funky tracks from Grier's most iconic blaxpoitation role (Coffy) in a film where Tarantino cast her to give her the legit, prestigious leading role that he thought she was always dishonorably denied. It's easy, but it also works. "Escape" might be the instance where it works best because it isn't a Coffy track that's overlaid on a hero shot of Grier. "Escape" plays when Odell (Samuel L. Jackson) discovers that Jackie Brown (Grier) has duped him and she's now long gone. Odell, Louis (Robert De Niro) and Brown are all in motion, but not swiftly, and Ayers' high hat intro to a bigger funk song is the correct use of this track, as Odell and Louis pull over and the action stops for a moment of Tarantino violence.
Fun fact: Peyton Reed reused this orchestration in Ant-Man.
"The Braying Mule" from 'Two Mules for Sister Sara' (1970)
Orchestrated by: Ennio Morricone
Appears in: Django Unchained
Two Mules for Sister Sara is the unlikely team-up of Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine as a cowboy and a nun on the run and this magnificent track from Morricone is so perfectly jangly and ethereal it's almost a shame that it only plays once in the movie. Tarantino makes amends for that implements it as a repeated theme for Django (Jamie Foxx) as he learns his new trade of being a bounty hunter (a.k.a. killin' white folks for money).
"Main Theme from Dark of the Sun" from 'Dark of the Sun' (1968)
Orchestrated by: Jacques Loussier
Appears in: Inglourious Basterds
Dark of the Sun is a mercenary adventure film from director Jack Cardiff, one of the most famed cinematographers of all time—especially if you take your cinema hints from Martin Scorsese (whose love for The Red Shoes has helped keep the film traveling around to film festivals for nearly 70 years). With Cardiff at the helm, Dark of the Sun is more visually appealing than a number of mercenary b-movies that were becoming commonplace in the late 60s and he needed evocative music to match it. The score by Loussier is repetitive piano greatness, very cat and mouse, and very appropriate for characters who are processing information. It's so appropriate that Tarantino uses four themes from the film—nearly in full—throughout Basterds.
"Sally and Jack" from 'Blow Out' (1980)
Orchestrated by: Pino Donaggio
Appears in: Death Proof
This might be one of Tarantino's most telling use of music. Brian De Palma's Blow Out is one of the director's top three favorite films of all time (and it is really great, particularly how De Palma enhances everything that cinema can offer—sight and sound—with extreme isolation to reveal the power that both celluloid and audio have). And Tarantino uses this nice piano melody from the film to drown out the jukebox music that's blasting in a Texas chili shack. When Sydney Tamiia Poitier focuses on her text message conversation with an anonymous boyfriend the surroundings disappear—she's so drawn into her own thought—and this piano ode for a potential couple (John Travolta and Nancy Allen in Blow Out) who Tarantino obviously loves, is as close to Tarantino wearing a heart on his sleeve as we might get. Of course, Tarantino himself kills the mood immediately after by appearing in the scene to buy shots for the table of girls.
"Nicaragua" from 'Under Fire' (1981)
Orchestrated by: Jerry Goldsmith
Appears in: Django Unchained
Goldsmith's score for Under Fire has a bit of a merry-go-round carnival sound quality to it, perhaps standing in for the swapping-spots love triangle between three journalists in a foreign conflict. Its playfulness actually works better in Django because Tarantino uses it macabrely, as the music when Foxx and Christoph Waltz arrive in Candyland, which is a horrific plantation that's run like a fun house by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).
"Un Amico" from 'Revolver' (1973)
Orchestrated by: Ennio Morricone
Appears in: Inglourious Basterds
I actually can't speak to the quality nor this track's use in Revolver, an Italian actioner that stars some underrated actors who are personal favorites of mine—Oliver Reed (The Devils) and Paola Pitagora (Fists in the Pocket)—and just got added to my must see queue. I can speak to its use in Basterds however, as it perfectly accompanies the slow-mo fatal end for the might-have-been-lovers-if-not-for-that-whole-Nazi-hero story between Shoshanna (Laurent; damn, Shoshanna gets all the great cues!) and Fredrick (Daniel Brühl). The double death occurs in the projection booth before the fantasy deaths of the entire Third Reich happens in the theatre, and one of Morricone's sweeter compositions laments their demise.
Playlist of These Eight Tracks + Four More Tracks That Appeared in Other Films
Honorable Mentions (songs from other films, used by Tarantino):
- Sandy Rogers' "Fool for Love" which was recorded for Robert Altman's adaptation of Sam Shepard's play Fool for Love and also appeared in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.
- Willy DeVille's "It's So Easy" which was recorded for William Friedkin's gay cruising exploitation noir Cruising; Tarantino used the track in Death Proof.
- David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" which was written for the opening credits of Cat People and re-used by Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds (perhaps to better use, as this 80s pop track sets up the eventual fantasy of Tarantino's revisionist history inside the theatre: the assassination of all the Third Reich).
- Finally, there's the classic Jim Croce song "I've Got a Name" which originally appeared in The Last American Hero and was used again in Django Unchained.