three of my favorite soundtrack composers are elliott goldenthal, howard shore and christopher young.
shore writes very moody, dense underscore and has worked a lot with two of my favorite directors, david fincher (on PANIC ROOM and THE GAME) and david cronenberg (THE FLY, DEAD RINGERS, VIDEODROME, many others) most recently, he won an oscar for his lord of the rings soundtrack, but his other work is typically less bombastic and wonderfully cerebral, like an escher drawing you can analyze this way and that without a real resolution.
young is probably best known to this group for replacing coil on clive barker's HELLRAISER -- and in my opinion he wrote a much better score than coil's. extremely dark and fiery, even ambient in places. his OST for george romero's THE DARK HALF is superb -- very melancholy and lyrical but very dark as well.
goldenthal is perhaps my favorite -- his stuff is very modern and aggressive but an incredibly dense listen, maybe the most compositionally advanced of the lot. he definitely has a contemporary and ambient sensibility -- check out HEAT, ALIEN 3, DEMOLITION MAN, TITUS for some great examples.
these are three of the best in my opinion, in addition to past masters like herrmann and morricone who have already been mentioned.
cheers,
ashok
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