Fifty years after his death, iconic film composer Bernard Herrmann rises from the grave.

This summer, Apple TV has one of the most popular series on television, “Cape Fear.”

Based on John D. MacDonald’s book “The Executioners” and first adapted in 1962 and redone in 1991, this is the third version of the same story.  After years of incarceration, ex-con Max Cady seeks vengeance against Sam Bowden, the attorney who put him in prison.

What makes the new version “must-hear” TV is composer Jeff Russo’s employment of Bernard Herrmann’s original score which Elmer Bernstein also used in 1991.  The opening scene of each episode is highly effective. It’s a 6-8 minute segment that builds up to a climax with a powerful blast of Herrman’s music with the block outline letters of the words “cape fear” overfilling the screen to squeeze back to normal size.

That the show is this good has little to do with Apple TV.  Lately, streaming services are cutting costs of its content.  For “Cape Fear,” Apple was looking to reduce the budget and insisted on a more modern score than composer Russo’s choice of Herrmann.

After executive producers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese (both who hold rights to the material) held their ground, the budget remained robust and the Herrmann score was used.

More than half of the credit of why the series has captivated the public has to do with the thunderous and vertiginous bars of Herrmann’s score.

It’s a reminder how a masterful score can elevate the visual content and how few composers these days design memorable motifs.

Credit goes to Russo for headlining Herrmann’s score as if it’s a main character in the drama.  It envelops the Bowden family in a shroud of nightmarish despair, a hypnotic glue that tightly holds the suspense and captivates and sustains viewers for nine hours.

Even if the average person can’t articulate it, at a subconscious level, it enters their brain as a hallucinatory drug. We are ensnared in the maelstrom of the Bowdens’ misery, a relentless whirlpool of terror that draws us inexorably toward the abyss.

Which is why the producers should have put Herrmann’s name in the opening credits instead of burying it in the end credits which automaticlly cuts away to play the next episode ensuring that most people will never know who wrote the music. 

Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith told me he agrees. “He’s one of the reasons that this story keeps being remade – a key character in the drama and its atmosphere.”

“At least the re-use of the score is bringing him to the attention of a new generation,” Smith said.

His musical fingerprints are all over this show.  Give him his due.