Before the trailer for “Inception” introduced the world to the bassy, brassy “braaaams” that dominated movie trailers for years, there was one song that could be heard in virtually every movie trailer of the early ’00s, Clint Mansell‘s “Lux Aeterna.” Now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky‘s gut-punching “Requiem for a Dream,” Lionsgate has released a new recording of the iconic song.
The video reconvenes the Kronos Quartet for a socially-distanced performance of “Lux Aeterna,” without clips or any footage from the film, but it’s quite difficult not to have the images of the four main characters curling up into a fetal position while listening to the music. “The music is, in the best possible way, heavy-handed,” composer Clint Mansell told Vulture for an oral history of the show. “I can imagine more experienced filmmakers sort of going, “Oh, I think it’s a bit much,” but from our point of view, it was where we were at the time. And I think that’s the beauty of it. We didn’t have any experience at what we were doing, so we were just guided by what we liked and what worked for us.”
What really cemented “Lux Aeterna’s” place in history was really Peter Jackson‘s “The Two Towers.” For the first trailer of the second part of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, marketing company Ant Farm decided to adapt Mansell’s composition and turn it from an intimate and personal connection into an epic, grand-scale track with a full orchestra and choir, worthy of the scope of the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
Ant Farm’s composer, Simone Benyacar told Vice on an article on the song’s legacy “The DNA of the composition was haunting, dark, mysterious, but at the same time, could also be very epic and grand.” The new recording, dubbed “Requiem for a Tower,” was featured in trailers for everything from “The Da Vinci Code” to “I Am Legend.”
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