30: “Dan of the Dead”: Music and MediEvil

Karen M. Cook, @CooksterKC, University of Hartford

Andrew S. Powell, @ASPMusicTheory, Auburn University

In what follows, we present some of our work in progress on the critically acclaimed cult favorite MediEvil series for Playstation consoles.

The games’ central premise is temporal displacement, ironically embodied by skeletal hero Sir Daniel Fortesque. Dan died in 1286 fighting the evil sorcerer Zarok, who plotted to take over the kingdom of Gallowmere. While legend holds that Dan killed Zarok before dying himself, in reality he was felled in battle by the first arrow. Zarok returned one hundred years later but, in raising an army of the undead, accidentally resurrects Dan, who seizes the opportunity to attain true hero status by finally vanquishing Zarok.

The sequel shifts forward to 1886, where the sorcerer Lord Palethorn uses Zarok’s spellbook to raise London’s dead—including Dan. He joins local professor Hamilton Kift, his ghostly sidekick Winston Chapelmount, and an ancient mummy named Kiya to defeat Palethorn. Kiya is killed by Jack the Ripper, but Dan uses a time machine to save Kiya, then defeats Palethorn and joins Kiya in eternal rest.

Our work combines medievalist, gothic, film, and game audio scholarship to first explore how the games construct their worlds and narratives through sound. We suggest that the soundtracks play with aural tropes to create—and violate—Gothic, medievalist, horror, and comedy sensibilities. We then continue on to a study of how the music connects to the games’ transgressive temporality, which plays out both in literal time-travel and in cyclical arcs of resurrection and redemption.

The original concept for MediEvil was a fusion of Ghosts ’n Goblins with The Nightmare Before Christmas. The visuals are vibrant and over-exaggerated, full of dark shadows and jagged edges, and the gangly characters and fantastical creatures that romp through the graveyards, asylums, ruins, wild landscapes, and Victorian sewers draw as much on Beetlejuice as on medieval bestiaries.56

Composers Paul “Bob” Arnold and Andrew Barnabas have created a complex musical web of crosstemporal references. The quirky Danny Elfman-like soundtrack uses low brass, a playful “oom-pah,” metallic twinkling, wordless voices, dissonance, and layered contrasts along with a slew of musical medievalisms such as harp, Gothic organ, church bells, lutes, recorders, and so forth. Sections of chant-like music use Latin or random syllables, and snippets of actual liturgical chant appear in religious locations.57

We argue that the first game’s music projects “temporal linearity”: medievalist and filmic idioms are independent but create meaning and humor by increasing or decreasing in salience. This mirrors Dan’s own “time,” which juxtaposes his past with his new present. For example, in “Hilltop Mausoleum,” the Gothic church organ, harp arpeggios, low brass, a church bell, and Latin chorus give way to the

56 Sample images are available at https://gallowmere.fandom.com/wiki/MediEvil. 57 https://tinyurl.com/3x9pwx88

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comedic, carnivalesque xylophone, oom-pah low brass, angular high brass, and overly exaggerated dynamics.58

The sequel’s musical influences, however, branch in multiple directions to create a kind of “temporal circularity” that blurs historical distinctions and reflects Dan’s time-traveling journey. Whereas in the aforementioned example, the medievalist cues and the more carnivalesque theme alternate and interrupt one another, in “The Count,” the underscore incorporates a host of references simultaneously. The music in this theme combines bits of the Dies Irae chant and Carl Orff’s famous “O Fortuna” with epic scoring reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and a quote of Danny Elfman’s Batman theme, while medievalist harp and Gothic organ layer on top of this thematic mélange.59

Fig. 30.1: Transgressive Temporality in MediEvil

Such boundary-crossing allusions and relationships mirror Dan’s time-traveling journey from the outset of the game as well as the course of his adventure. His quest to save Kiya and return to his own time transgresses his past, present, and future.

In our larger project, we dig in more deeply to the differences between all four soundtracks with regard to technology, revision, and orchestration; we explore how other musical tropes such as the violin, harpsichord, and piano further affect and reflect Dan’s transgressive temporal timelines; and we utilize scholarship on the Gothic, as well as on Danny Elfman’s style and collaborations with Tim Burton, to analyze the roles that nostalgia and memory play in the game—on Dan’s part as well as that of the players.

58 https://tinyurl.com/5n8favyh 59 https://tinyurl.com/5n9ye2mn

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Bibliography

Bessell, David. “What’s That Funny Noise? An Examination of the Role of Music in Cool Boarders 2, Alien Trilogy and Medievil 2.” In ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, edited by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, 136–44. New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2002.

Cook, Karen M. “Beyond (the) Halo: Chant in Video Games.” In Studies in Medievalism, edited by Karl Fugelso, XXVII:183–200. Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2018.

———. “Beyond the Grave: The ‘Dies Irae’ in Video Game Music.” Sounding Out! (blog), December 18, 2017. https://soundstudiesblog.com/2017/12/18/beyond-the-grave-the-dies-irae-in-videogame-music/.

Deaville, James. “The Topos of ‘Evil Medieval’ in American Horror Film Music.” In Music, Meaning, & Media, edited by Erkki Pekkilä, David Neumeyer, and Richard Littlefield, 26–37. Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute, 2006.

Elferen, Isabella van. “Danny Elfman’s Musical Fantasyland, or, Listening to a Snow Globe.” In The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 65–82. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Halfyard, Janet K., ed. The Music of Fantasy Cinema. Genre, Music and Sound. Equinox, 2014.

——— . Danny Elfman’s Batman: A Film Score Guide. Film Score Guides. Scarecrow Press, 2004.

Powell, Andrew S. “A Composite Theory of Transformations and Narrativity for the Music of Danny Elfman in the Films of Tim Burton.” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2018. Trigg, Stephanie. “Medievalism and Theories of Temporality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, edited by Louise D’Arcens, 196–209. Cambridge Companions to Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

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