List-O-Phobia.

FEARnet rolled out its Greatest Horror Themes: The Sequel today, and because I have annexed a section of my horror heart for just this type of hodgepodge, I clicked over and perused the picks. I won't give away the store, but with the original list recalling the old reliables, a few surprises were thrown into this one, and I was so pumped that I began to reply back with my own list, save for the intrinsic knowledge that the writer could give a rat's ass that 1) I think David Hess' "Now You're Alone" trumps everything on his list on any day of the week, and 2) my childhood fear of Giorgio Moroder's "The Chase" theme from Midnight Express has only intensified in my late thirties.

But the biggest reason why I scrapped my reply is that unless I were being paid to produce a list like this, it is literally impossible for me to organize anything I'm passionate about into ordered objectivity. Favorite film? Okay, Romero's Dawn of the Dead. But list my second favorite? Forget it. I can't list my favorite album, my favorite band, my favorite food—I just can't. Horror is no exception, and it's actually the one thing that I'm at a complete loss to categorize.

I can tell you that my favorite composer of all time is the brilliant, legendary, beautiful Fabio Frizzi. At a loss to find any uploads of The Beyond OST on YouTube a few years back, I dug up my Anchor Bay 2-Disc SE and did it myself:



The day Fabio Frizzi commented on my upload, I nearly wet myself a rainbow.

I get excited when I see Frizzi make one of these "Best Themes" lists, but I get evangelical when I see themes that are hardly ever mentioned:

The Entity—Charles Bernstein
Dead and Buried—Joe Renzetti
Happy Birthday to Me—Bo Harwood & Lance Rubin
Alice Sweet Alice—Stephen J. Lawrence (this OST is my Holy Grail)
Sleepaway Camp—Edward Bilous

So while I've just gone and made a list, I haven't assigned any order to it—no premeditated ranking, no numbers qualifying my picks from least to most favorite. I guess you could say that as horror fans, our preferences are ultimately like our children—we can't choose our favorites. The problem with this parallel is that I don't have any children, and my friends are happy to take my soundtracks off my hands at anytime.