The Last House On the Left

Director Dennis Iliadis’ well-crafted redux of Wes Craven’s low-budget 1972 original may rely on the same unlikely cinematic source material — Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring — yet its graphic shock quotient is decidedly 21st-century. Thankfully, Liverpool-born composer John Murphy’s musical score largely underplays those horrors with a taut, organic-suffused electronic soundtrack that eschews much of the contemporary genre’s penchant for shrieking sonic bombast. Instead, Murphy skillfully builds the musical suspense cue by cue, sometimes using nothing more ornate than the title track’s gentle guitar arpeggios or, elsewhere, the simple, haunting sigh of synthesized wind. The hypnotic, string ‘n’ synth wash of “Candles” is an ethereal gateway to the soundtrack’s even more unsettling — yet ever restrained — handful of denouement cues, before the bittersweet “The End” and an alternate, more fully orchestrated version of the score’s title cue bring Murphy’s quietly creepy exercise in post-modern horror music full circle.