Silva Screen

A JOURNEY BACK IN TIME THE PRIMEVALS belongs to a different time, a different place, an imagined world of monsters, myth and magic that has only ever existed within the confines of classic fantasy cinema. Even if its chief architect, David Allen, had lived and the film had been released in the 1990s, it would have still been out of synch with the zeitgeist.

Seen today, it’s a truly singular experience, floating in a bubble outside and above anything else being made.

THE PROJECT Fifty years ago, filmmaker David Allen registered the story for the film that would become The Primevals. His goal was to elevate the art of stop-motion animation into more serious, thoughtful storytelling. In the mid-1960s, the film had started as an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, reminiscent of the fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen that had impressed David as a child.

He died in 1999 and the task of completing the film fell to his visual effects colleague Chris Endicott.

Chris Alexander, editor of Fangoria and Delirium magazines, says – “Though we can indeed credit Allen’s vision and his devout passion in bringing this land of the lost to vivid life (not to mention his protégé Chris Endicott’s loyalty to seeing that dream through), I believe it’s Richard Band’s thundering, evocative score that amplifies the overall experience, accentuating every delirious moment, every delicate passage, every terrifying encounter, with an unapologetically old-fashioned sense of the cinema fantastique. From the opening moments of vast mountainous landscapes to our first astonishing glimpse of the Yeti to the spastic showdown with the sadistic Lizard beings, Band’s full-blooded soundscape serves to trap us in this world, make us complicit with both heroes and villains alike, and immerse us deeply inside this lovingly sculpted imaginary universe.”

THE ALBUM While award winning and Emmy nominated composer Richard Band is primarily known to many as a composer for Horror and Genre films, but he has often stepped well outside the horror genre and diversified his body of work demonstrating his ability to tackle any genre and style presented to him.

Richard outlines his approach to the music and the inspiration that lies behind it – “I’ve always been a firm believer in the importance of themes in film scoring and this score cried out for an epic theme perhaps in the classical manner of a Steiner, Herrmann or Rozsa, or perhaps even a Goldsmith, Williams, Jarre or Shore. It was movies from my childhood like ‘Lost Horizon’ and ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ as well as epics like ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and ‘Ben-Hur’ that had the import I was searching for. This film was a true joy to score and well worth the roughly 20 odd years I waited to do it.”

It was just a few months ago that Richard was awarded the MOSMA Film Music Festival’s “LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD” in Malaga, Spain for his film music over the years. The two nights of concerts included an encore in which the premiere live performance of the PRIMEVALS main title for full orchestra was performed.

The Primevals represents a glorious hark back to the classic scores that fuelled so many of the Harryhausen films of the 1950s and 1960s. A delirious thrill-ride through the joys of monsters, ray-guns, spaceships and good old-fashioned stop motion animation.