George Harrison’s song Beware Of Darkness provides the perfect soundtrack to the opening scene of horror film Weapons.
A child’s voice tells us that what we are about to watch is a true story of what happened in her home town two years earlier.
What happened is that at 2.17am one day, 17 children from the same primary school class “woke up, got out of bed, walked down stairs, opened the front door, walked across the front yard and into the dark, and they never came back.”
Scary or what?
The music that accompanies this chilling scenario is not some sort of generic jump-scare horror-movie music full of eerie scrapes of a violin bow and sudden parps of a brass instrument – but this gentle tune by George Harrison.
Beware Of Darkness is just perfect.
Harrison was deep into his Hare Krishna phase when he wrote it – the last song he composed for his first post-Beatles solo album All Things Must Pass, with a studio full of fellow devotees.
It has various parallel meanings: on the one hand philosophical: about how spiritual matters should override material concerns; but also about the break-up of The Beatles and the fractured relationships that followed. More broadly, it’s a warning against corrupt politicians (“Beware of greedy leaders”) and negative thoughts in general.
The album version is lovely, with Harrison on slide guitar and Eric Clapton on electric, with Traffic’s Dave Mason on acoustic guitar; Gary Wright on organ and Bobby Whitlock on piano; and a rhythm section of Carl Radle and Ringo Starr.
But Harrison’s subsequent live performance at the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh – a popular album among the older boys at my school – with Leon Russell singing the third verse (and Clapton and Starr again in the band), is even better.
Beware Of Darkness has since been covered by artists including a very different version by Leon Russell himself, as well as Marianne Faithfull, Concrete Blonde, Sheryl Crow, Spock’s Beard (me neither), Joe Cocker, Matthew Sweet and Susannah Hoffs.
Oh and go and see Weapons… it’s fantastic!