People forget what a stir the erotic thriller Basic Instinct caused in 1992, but I’ll never forget (other than who my date was, lol) when I engaged the film with a sold-out audience. Already culling a reputation within a week of release for Sharon Stone’s bursting sexuality (particularly the notorious upskirt interrogation scene), I loved the movie for its tenseness and noir overtones and thought Stone and Michael Douglas played their adversarial dark romance to perfection.

I remember everyone in the theater nervously laughing at the fearlessness of Stone’s on-top grinding motions in the sex scenes, seldom depicted so boldly in a mainstream rated R movie. Once she and Douglas are in the rave club (with the amazing slam of LaTour’s “Blue” throbbing all around them and us, as the viewers) and we discover Stone has a jealous female lover, everyone gasped and groaned. Bisexuality was seldom touched on in film back then, keep in mind. With this playing into the film’s finale, it’s no wonder everyone laughed again as Stone shags Douglas once more, making us feel he is yet again on the edge of death’s door. Is this thing between them for real, or is Stone really going to take him out like a black widow after jetting her juice? La Petite Mort? Fake out! But WTF? That icepick under the bed!!

Now, as many of you know, I’m a madman for film scores and soundtracks. I always play a score when writing fresh material. The late composer Jerry Goldsmith’s gusting noir behind Basic Instinct is one of his many masterpieces. Breezy, impetuous, sexy. Deadly. One of my go-tos for creation.

I recall being enthralled in the theater in ’92 by the haunting and elegant tapestries Goldsmith weaves into the film and even my date commented on its gorgeous breeziness. She’d grabbed for my hand once at a jump scare in the film, that sticks out in my mind. All these years later, I play the soundtrack more than the movie, though I figure I’m overdue for a return drop into Stone and Douglas’ sensuous playground of murder.

As to Goldsmith, I hear numerous hails of Alex North’s Spartacus score from 1960 and passages from Miklós Rózsa’s Ben-Hur, 1959 in the opening sections. The rest of Goldsmith’s Basic Instinct comes (to my ears) a more Gothic soar from blueprints laid down by John Williams, even if comparing both of these masters’ work to one another is ultimately a cheat.

Goldsmith and Williams are, combined, the most prolific film composers of all time when you span Jerry Goldsmith’s career back to scoring 1950s t.v. series. Alien, the original Planet of the Apes and The Omen, Poltergeist, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (and many other Trek projects), Chinatown, Papillion, both Gremlins movies, Total Recall, Hoosiers, L.A. Confidential are some of his most iconic film scores and I assure you I’m nowhere near skimming the surface to Goldsmith’s mountainous resume. His work behind 1999’s The Mummy is probably my most-played score of Goldsmith’s, but when I’m working on something sinister, flirty with an edge of dirty, you better believe the music of Basic Instinct is often fueling me.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.