The score to Robert Eggers‘ “Nosferatu” (now in theaters) gets under your skin, and that’s exactly what composer Robin Carolan hoped to achieve.
Carolan gathered 60 string players to play a “spiral effect sound that is supposed to feel really disorienting and hit you in the gut.”
Eggers reimagines F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent German Expressionist film, with Lily-Rose Depp starring as Ellen, a young woman who becomes the object of desire for the terrifying vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). The supporting cast includes Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and Willem Dafoe.
Eggers didn’t want Carolan to use any electronics or synthesizers. “It wasn’t an option,” the composer says knowing Eggers wanted every detail in the film to be accurate to the times, including the score. In addition to the strings, there were percussion, horn and woodwinds added to layer the music.
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One of the first motifs Carolan wrote was Ellen’s theme, which was written as a demo version. Carolan explains, “Rob wanted something to play before they went and shot the film.”
As experimental as the score was, it still needed to have a lush and melodic sound to it. “I wanted to lean into the tragedy and the melancholy of the story, and a lot of that comes from Ellen’s character.”
Ellen’s motif begins as a quintet-based baroque sound put together with contemporary strings.
Her early motifs are “small sounding,” according to Carolan, to reflect her interior emotions – Ellen, a newlywed, once reached out to a guardian angel seeking comfort. Enter Count Orlok, who becomes obsessed with her and continues to haunt her.
Carolan needed to create fear when it came to Skarsgård’s Count Orlok. But it posed a challenge, “Orlok is essentially Dracula, and Dracula is such an iconic literary film figure, and so many people have written themes for the character or music for these movies.”
Carolan felt pressure to make something memorable. Even though the character is the villain of the film, Eggers and Caroloan wanted to try to humanize him at times so his motifs are “big, blustery and thunderous, but at certain points takes a turn into the melancholy.”
In addition to strings and percussion, Carolan used a toaca, a traditional Romanian instrument used largely in monasteries in that region. “It’s a huge plank of wood that you bang with mallets and you can get different sounds out of it. It gave certain scenes their own character,” he explains.
When it came to the film’s finale, Orlok and Ellen’s themes fused in a grand 10 minutes of score. Says Carolan, “I wanted that to sound as big and emotional as possible.” He adds, “I wanted to write it almost as a fucked-up sounding wedding. It’s almost romantic, but there’s also this creepy edge to it as well.”
Listen to the score below.