NPR Music - The most terrifying film scores of all time

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

We celebrate spooky season with an unnerving mix of songs from our favorite horror movie scores, including The Shining, Under The Skin, Hereditary and more.Enjoy the show? Tell a friend and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] songs and films:1. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind: "Main Title" and "Clockworks (Bloody Elevators)," from The Shining2. Mark Korven: "The Goat & The Mayhem," from The Witch3. Goblin: "Sighs," from Suspiria4. Hildur Guǒnadóttir: "The Door," from Chernobyl5. John Carpenter: "Main Title," from Halloween6. Colin Stetson: "Mothers & Daughters," from Hereditary7. Mica Levi: "Lipstick To Void," from Under the Skin8. Cristobal Tapia De Veer: "Laura Smile," from Smile9. Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow: "The Alien," from Annihilation10. Bobby Krlic: "Gassed," from MidsommarSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Well, Hazel, I have been waiting all year to do this episode with you because you and I, we both love horror films, right? We do. We really do. Yeah, it is your jam. That's something I clocked very early on when I met you, however many years ago, like, oh, yeah. I want to hang with Hazel because we both love horror movies. And now that spooky season is here, I kind of thought, you know, what better way to celebrate it than to play and talk about. some of our favorite music from our favorite horror films. And we've got to start with one that I know we both agree is an absolute masterpiece.

This is what people hear when they come to my apartment. You hit my doorbell in this place. Well, so, you know, this is for, I mean, anyone who watches horror movies would know that this is the main title to the shiny. the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film The Shining, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind. Oh my God, in this moment, we're flying over the mountains on our way to the Overlook Hotel. What makes this score so great, or this song in particular, so great, is for me, it kind of, like, contains the Shining's horror narrative in miniature. It's like you have these really modern, forward-thinking synth washes that are like Wendy Carlos's bread and butter, And then like, the further that the song gets, you get Rachel's vocals.

It's just like there's this creepy sort of hauntedness that's buried under the score. Like there's something ghostly that's like trying to make its way out of the song or something like that. But every time I hear this, I'm immediately chilled. Yeah, and it perfectly captures, I guess because of it being the sense in a way, it captures the iciness. Yes. of this Snowden Resort. But it's also kind of grand and gothic.

It has this demented majesty to it, if that makes sense, which is what the hotel itself has, which is very much at the center of the film. You know, it's interesting. Wendy Carlos, her music is just so synonymous to me anyway with this film. And yet there's actually very little of it in the movie. Most of it is by Penderetsky and Legatti and Bartok. Yeah, I mean, Wendy and Rachel originally had written a lot more.

music for this movie. And Kubrick really only used two pieces that they had made for it, which is something that happened to them as well when they worked on Clockwork Orange with him. They composed way more music and, you know, he ended up going with a lot of classical pieces. So, but I completely agree with you. When I think of the music of the Shining, I'm not thinking of those avant-garde classical compositions that he used in the movie. I'm thinking of these haunting scores. Yeah. So there was, there was one piece. piece of music that was used in a trailer, a Wendy Carlos piece. She wrote for it and she called the piece Clockworks, but then in parentheses later after it was used in the trailer, I guess,

decided to call it bloody elevators because that's what's happening in the trailer for it. Maybe the most famous trailer of all time, I'm not sure. It's so good. It's mind-blowing. So it's just this static shot of these elevators in the hotel. and then the doors start to open and all of this blood comes gushing out. It's just a waterfall.

And it fills the room so rapidly, you know, all the furniture is floating. Oh my God, it was incredible. Yeah, right? So I have to tell you, I was a little kid when this movie came out. I was like 10 years old or something. One afternoon, I was watching television at home alone,

and this trailer came on and freaked me up. out so much that I ran out of the house. Oh my God. And I just, I just panicked. I ran out of the house. And I just, and I sat on the sidewalk out in front of our house and waited until my parents got home.

I've never forgotten, you know, what, you know, 40 years later, seeing that trailer and this music. Yeah. I know. So we're going to try to get through a lot of music here. And it was really hard to pick what, what we play because there's just so much music. from horror movies that I love, but I knew when I was putting this list together that I absolutely had to play something from the movie The Witch. This was scored by the composer Mark Corvin.

So for people who don't know, it takes place in the 1630s and it follows this family that's, well, you know, they've been kicked out of a Puritan settlement. There's some sort of disagreement they have with the elders over some religious doctrine. It's not really clear. But anyway, not long after the family goes out into the woods on their own. They have a baby and the baby disappears. And the older sister swears that he was stolen by a witch. So one of the most distinctive things about the film is that the writer and director Robert Eggers, he did the whole thing in this kind of, it was very stylized, kind of like old English or something.

You know, and he manages to do it without it sounding dumb. I mean, it works really, really well. But the music that Mark Corvin did feels like it was also written. in the 1600s. You know, in the age of witches, it's largely performed on these old folk instruments and whatnot.

This is a cut from the score called the goat and the mayhem. So this cut has some obvious jump scares in it right off the top, very drony in other parts, but I want to scoge ahead to maybe about the last minute

or so here. Yeah, I love this part. There's something in that rhythmic, percussive sound. It's like, almost like clapping, like hand clapping? Yeah, to me it conjures up women like in a circle. Like there's something about this score in particular.

And you kind of hear it at the beginning too, where it's really hard for me to place exactly what instruments he was using, which only makes it more unsettling. But yes, there is this kind of nursery rhyme, hand clap quality to that percussion that, of course, just makes me think of like a circle of witches. Well, it makes me think of children playing, which to me is super creepy. It's like... Children should not be playing.

If children are playing, if you see kids playing, run. Well, that's the thing in horror is when you see the exact opposite of what you expect, sometimes that's more unsettling, and there's something very creepy. We'll talk about this in some of the other scores, but like when you hear tinkling bell sounds, like really, but that becomes very creepy and something about a... children playing. I don't want this. The moment children or religion or anything like that enter the story, things get exponentially more creepy for me. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So that's Mark Corvin, his score for The Witch. He's done so much stuff that I love. He's got such a distinctive sound.

He also did The Lighthouse. That was another movie by Robert Edgars. He most recently scored the first Omen, which I haven't seen. Have you seen that? I have seen it. And, you know, it is scary. Yeah. Well, I did see a trailer for it. I'm when I went to see Oppenheimer, they played a trailer for it. And I texted my wife during it because my son, who was only 11 at the time, he wanted to come see Oppenheimer with me. And I said, nah, I don't know if it's appropriate. And then they showed that trailer.

And I said, oh, my God, if our son saw that trailer, he'd be hospitalized for the rest of his life. Because the trailer was so unsettling. Have your kids not inherited your love of horror yet? Oh, my God. They are the biggest wimps. They could find something to be afraid of in Curious George or something like that. Yeah, we can't even go to the mall in October because they might see a movie poster or something like that. Oh, my gosh.

And that's enough. They're particularly afraid of dolls. So, like when Abigail came out. Annabel. Or Annabel, thank you. When Annabelle, is Abigail from, do I totally have it wrong? Isn't Abigail the name of the doll in The Conjuring? that starts...

No, it's Annabel. It's Annabelle. Wait a minute. What's the... Oh, Megan. Is it Megan? Oh, Megan is the other doll. Megan, that's the one.

I'm glad we're talking about this. Let's get this sorted out. Yeah. No, Megan. They saw it like a poster for Megan one time. And then they had to sleep in each other's room. They had to share a room together for like a month. I was the opposite as a child.

Yeah, I was too. I got out of bed. So HBO was invented when I was a little kid. And I grew up in this rural area where we had no TV at all, but finally we got HBO piped into the house. Cable arrived. And I would sneak up at night and go downstairs and watch all these movies. But you watched films with your folks, didn't you when you were a little kid? I did.

My parents are big scary movie people, big Halloween people. And as a kid, I loved Tales from the Cript and I loved goosebumps. And are you afraid of the dark? I feel like I grew up in a moment. I'm 30. I grew up in a moment where there was a lot of scary, spooky material for children. Tim Burton was everywhere. So I really, it was hard not to be a goth child.

Like, you know. Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point, that so much of it was seemingly aimed at kids. That wasn't happening in the 70s. And also the 70s was scarier. It was just a scary time. Real life scary. Yeah, yeah.

We're all going to die. Let's get to more music. More witches. We're going to more witches. Are you prepared? I am, and I have to be honest, I've never seen this film, and I never saw the remake either. Robin, you're killing me. I'm sorry.

I know. I don't know why I have it. I need to. Okay. Should I just, should I talk about it more? Should we just go into the music? Well, I can just hit this piece of music, and then we can hear a minute or so, and then you can tell me what it is that we're hearing, because it is quite something. I mean, good.

God, this is so horrifying. This is a song from the movie Susperia, 1977 Italian horror movie by the director Dario Argento. He's kind of a leading director of the Italian horror genre Gialo, which was big in the 60s and 70s. And Susperia is a movie about a ballet academy in Berlin, and there's an American student who comes, to study there and she quickly

learns, I don't think it's a spoiler, this movie is old enough, she quickly learns that the ballet academy like might be a front for a coven of witches. Of course, yes. Yeah, you know how that happens. And this song that's playing, Sise, it

plays right at the beginning of the movie's first like death scene. There's like a young student who sort of escaped the academy. She goes to her apartment and she feels like someone is watching her through the windows. And so there's all these scenes of her, like, looking at the windows in her apartment,

and the score is just building up and you got to see the movie. You got to see the movie to find out what happens to her. But this score is by the Italian Prague rock band Goblin, who has worked with Argento on a bunch of his movies. And the score for this movie is insane. It is, like, hands down, maybe my favorite horror. film score, it is just out of control. It's like funky rock music. There's all of these crazy instruments they're using. They're like using a bazuki, which is like a Greek mandolin and

synthesizers. And I think what's really interesting about this score and this track in particular is that Argento told Goblin that he wanted the audience to feel the witch's presence in the movie at all times, even when they weren't on screen. So you have all these like gasping voices, like chanting in the song. And it's like the witch's coven is there on screen, but they're not. The music is so overwhelming. Like, texturally the music is so complicated. And it's so loud in the movie.

And the movie's very like technicolor. And the costumes are really garish and lavish. It's just like a movie that feels like eating like cake with too much icing. on it. Like there's just so much happening. I'm imagining Daria Argento telling the composer, I wanted to be like a cake, you know, but with too much, too much icing. You know how terrifying that is.

Yeah, and so, I don't know. I love that goblin was just like, yeah, man, like we're going to bring it in the score. We're going to make it feel like everything's happening at once. Well, I love it. I agree this is incredible. I'm going to have to put Susperia up next on my list of horror movies. that I've been meaning to catch up on. All right, Hazel,

scariest movie you ever saw. I mean, I felt, we are going to talk about this movie a little bit later in this episode, but I was pretty scared of hereditary when I saw it in theaters. I felt sick in the theater, and that's not a typical feeling

that I experience during hard movies, and I went home after my screening. I went to the screening alone, and my boyfriend at the time was out of time, so I was alone in the apartment, and I was scared. Yeah. I was like scared in my apartment. Yeah.

Yeah. That's creepy movie. That's a good one. I have to go with the ring, actually. Ooh. And when it came out, because I don't know if that's a movie that would hold up now. I haven't seen it since it came out because we don't even have VCRs anymore. And the VHS tape is very much at the center of that movie.

Yeah. But there was something about that film that got under my skin. And I remember I was staying at a friend's apartment when we watched it and I slept on the couch that night. And I remember I had a nightmare and fell out, fell off the couch. Like I was flailing because I was so freaked out by that movie. I actually want to talk about a film that is not explicitly a horror film, but is very horrifying. I think it's the TV series Chernobyl that came out a few years ago about the nuclear meltdown that happened at Chernobyl. back in 1986 in the cleanup that followed.

The score for it is by one of my all-time favorite composers, Hilder Guna Doter. So much of her music and so many of her projects, I find to be deeply unnerving in the most, it's most curious ways. It's very curious and inventive, and it's often very minimalist, but I want to play one of the first cuts

that you hear from her in the show Chernobyl. This cut is called The Door. And when you listen to this, you know, the way that that, I don't know if it's brushed snare drums or whatever that percussion is. It's all off. It kind of skitters. It really creates this sense of instability.

And also it's very unpredictable. Yeah, it's unpredictable. And it's like, obviously this is a very methodically, you know, composed piece of music for this project. But it feels like it's happening in real time. Like there's an improvisational quality that makes it especially creepy. I guess it's the unpredictability. that you're saying and also just the softness and

the inability for me to place exactly, again, what the instrument is. Yeah. Like, what is that? Yeah. That's going to come up a lot in some of the stuff that we talk about. I think that's been a real trend with film composers lately. It's coming up with sounds that people can identify.

Sound design is becoming a bigger and bigger part of scores, particularly of horror scores, I think. Yeah, it's interesting because it's like, You know, this is the only score on this episode that is based on a real life horrific event. And so it's almost, at least to me, feels like it requires a different kind of scary scoring. Like this isn't something where there's going to be like crazy jump scares. There's no witches and ghosts and monsters.

And creating that underlying paranoia is really important to the project. Well, and you talk about how it's based on something that actually happened. And Hilder Guna Duterteer also went and sampled a lot of creaking and buzzing sounds from an old decommissioned power plant in Lithuania. So a lot of the sounds you're hearing because you can't place them are sounds that she sampled from an actual power plant and then turned into playable. So cool. Hilda Guno Doter again, her score for Chernobyl. And this next one kind of feels inevitable. This song really goes off.

You can kind of dance to it. It's like... But have you tried to dance to it? I'm like kind of dancing to it. The reason I say that is because it's very deceptive. It's got that thumping beat. So it sounds like it's a 4-4 disco beat, you know, like boom, boom, or dance beat. But it is not in 4-4.

It's in 5-4 or maybe 10-8. I'm not sure. If you try to count it out, it's actually... I'm going to tell you, it is 5-4. Okay. Because Carpenter has talked about that. Okay. Because this rhythm is inspired by a beat that his father taught him on bongos in the 60s, and he recreated it on the synthesizer.

So, of course, this is the main title, The Halloween, the Jung Carpenter did. To me, it is up there with something like tubular bells, the Mike Oldfield song that was used in The Exorcist. It has a similar winding, repeating pattern, right? And it's kind of dizzying, you know. And I think, again, things get more. creepy when you bring bells in, right? And even though this song, it's not bells, it's a piano, but I think the piano is taking on a similar role. Totally. Yeah, and I mean, like, Halloween is obviously a movie that is set in the suburbs. You know, Michael Myers is terrorizing these teenage

girls, and there's something kind of innocent and simple about the idea of using a piano and just, like, using those, this kind of very simple instrument. But then he, at This creepiness with the synthesizers and the sort of like more electronic beats that he's using in the score. And he has talked about making the score, you know, very cheaply. Like this was a, this was a small movie, and John Carpenter has scored a lot of his movies, and it's really been out of economic, you know, necessity. And the way that he could do that very quickly and cheaply was by using a synthesizer. And, and, and, but it adds this very complex quality to the movie.

And there is this kind of like propulsion to it. Like, you know, Michael Myers is like, sometimes he's really slow. And sometimes he's really fast. Well, there's, there's, the score matches that. I don't know. Yeah, well, there's, and there's no resolution to it, right? There's no real end to this piece, which really telegraphs the whole idea that he's still out there, you know. Yes.

Yeah, you're not safe. There's that ticking in the background. Like, like, tick, tick, tick, tick, and it is like you're running out of time. Like, I feel like someone's got a timer on me. Oh, so good. Yeah. Yeah. And I love what he ended up with because he was forced to buy his limitations.

So, you know, one of the ways that John Carpenter saved money wasn't just by doing it on cents. It was by doing it himself. He just did the music himself, right? I mean, I think they paid him like $10,000. or something to write it and direct it and do the music. I mean, he did it all for next to nothing. I was going to tell you more stories of the horrors of growing up in the 70s. It was just an absolute terrifying time to be a child.

And part of it was... You guys had space heaters and wearing polyester all the time. You could burst into flames at any moment. And, well, you know, part of it was there were no boundaries with horror movie trailers. So they were on TV constantly. So, you know, I'd be, maybe they never show them during Saturday morning cartoons, but I feel like I could be watching Saturday morning cartoons in a trailer for Phantasm or something like that. Or Phantasma. What is that movie?

Fantasm? Yeah. It was a very, very scary time. So I played Colin Stetson on the show recently because of his new album that's out, which is a very scary record, even though it's not for film score. But he has really staked out some solid territory and scoring scary movies ever since he did. Hereditary. You talked about that a little bit earlier on the program. And he did a truly terrifying score for Hereditary. That said, I want to play a song from the score they did that doesn't sound explicitly scary. It's actually a very, very pretty sounding song called Mothers and Daughters.

And, you know, most horror films have some moment of calm before the storm where it seems like everything's okay, even though it's not. And that's partly what's happening in this song. Again, it's called mothers and daughters. So, you know, all of the best horror films, they're never really about whatever it seems like they're about, right? You know, so like in the 50s, scary movies, you know, about alien invasions, they were really commentaries on our collective fear of communism, right? Or, you know, like Rosemary's Baby and the Omen and the Exorcist, they were all about the moral decay that people feared was happening to society, right? In the case of hereditary, it's not really a ghost story.

It's about the horrors of mother-daughter relationships, right? And then you get this piece, mothers and daughters, from Colin Stetson. Yeah, there's, obviously, it's a horror movie, but, you know, Ariaster as a director, you know, just the places that he puts his camera and sort of there's all these miniatures in the movie and sort of like toys and cult memorabilia. And I think that moments like this and the score, capture the kind of eerie magic of the movie. Like there's such, obviously there's so many moments in the movie that are like horrific

and super violent, but there are also these moments of like, what is happening? It just really captures these relationships are not what they seem on the surface. Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, it takes the idea of a mother and a daughter, and it seems like an innocent reflection, this piece of music, I think, on what should be a loving relationship, but it really, really isn't. And kind of how you can't escape your past. I mean, it's in the title. You can't escape your past. You can't escape your family.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so good. All right. So what else did you bring? So I brought, I mean, one of my favorite scorers period of the last, you know, few years. It is the sci-fi horror movie Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer with a score composed by Mika Levy. I'll go as far as to say this is maybe my favorite score period from the last 15 to 20 years, definitely one of my all-time favorites. It's one where when you're watching the movie, even if you don't normally pay attention to the music, it's inescapable.

You know you're hearing something very different and very special. And yet, I mean, so under the skin for people who haven't seen it is a movie about this sort of alien figure. played by Scarlett Johansson, who has sort of come to earth. Her intentions are kind of unclear, but we learn pretty quickly that she sort of seduces men and lures them into this house and then leads them into this liquidy black abyss and kills them. Yeah, it's not entirely clear what's going on. It's very ambiguous and there's very little dialogue in the movie.

And so the music is such an enormous. part of the film. I have heard that very simple single beat with a long pause between them. I have heard a lot of other composers riffing on this ever since Mikhalibi did it. Yeah, it's so distinctive. So simple, that sort of knocking noise. You hear this music in the movie when the alien in question is luring these men to their death. There's sort of this like inevitability of that like knocking noise.

And yeah, the score is incredible. And I remember when this movie came out, you know, I had been a fan of Mika Levy's work. I had sort of known of them as this kind of avant-garde pop artist who had worked as Mika-Choo in the Shapes. And I was just completely blown away. Yeah. You use the word alien to describe sounds in an earlier score that we played. That's what it sounds like when I listened to this score. You think you know the instruments.

Like you think, oh, that must be strings or something. or violins or something's very often unnatural about them and it's all just very alien and otherworldly, which is obviously perfect for a film about a kind of low-key alien invasion. Also kind of sexy. That's something too about this score, and I know that that's something Levy also wanted in the music, and there's something incredible that happens in the strings

in this piece of music where just when you think they're moving in a very comprehensible direction, or sort of adhering to something classical, they kind of warp. They kind of like screw around. And that to me is the central horror of the movie. You know, you have this woman. She looks like a normal woman.

She looks like a human woman. But just when you think that she is, the whole kind of world comes crashing down. Yeah. So I've been catching up on a bunch of horror films that I've been meaning to see. And, you know, it's hard for me to get to theaters. and see movies when they come out,

so I end up waiting until they come to streaming services. And I finally watched Smile, the film Smile. But like a lot of films, I was listening to the score from Smile, the moment it came out. And it is one of the most original works I've ever heard. It's by Christobal Tapia DeVier. Some might know him for the work that he did scoring the series White Lotus that was on HBO.

What he did for Smile could not be more different. It's kind of bonkers. Just listen to this cut called. Laura Smile. Like, what even is this? I don't even know what these sounds are. I feel like in my mind, I have this image of someone who's like trying to break their way out of a plastic tarp or something. Like, they're like gasping. Like, they can't breathe and they're like gasping against this like plastic cover. There is a breathlessness to this score and to the film, you know, again, what is the movie really about.

It is about the horror that women live through when they try to have it all, right? A career, kids, social life, et cetera. And the main character, you know, she's working 80 hours a week. She's super sleep deprived. And she feels like she's going mad. The word crazy gets thrown around at her a lot. And this music really animates that madness and the feeling that you're losing your grip on reality. Yeah, it's just like when your brain short circuits.

It is. Burnout, the horror score for burnout. Yeah, this is the only movie on the list of films that we're talking about that I haven't seen. We'll put this on your list of films to see because I'd be really curious to hear what you think after you see it. Have you seen the movie Annihilation? I have seen Annihilation. That's Alex Garland, right? Yes, it is.

Yeah, I like his stuff a lot. Yes, Annihilation, 2018 sci-fi horror movie based on the author Jeff Van der Meer's novel of the same name. It is a terrifying film, and it has an unbelievable score. This is a 12-minute-long cut. Yes. So maybe I should jump ahead here just to another section, you know, kind of give an idea of how it evolves. I thought it almost sounded biblical at times. Like there's this, I don't know, like something you'd hear in a church from the future.

There are a lot of textures to the score. You know, Annihilation is a movie about a group of scientists who enter this like quarantine section of Florida called the shimmer where alien life has sort of overtaken it and is mutating. human life, plants, creatures, and the scientists, when they go through into the shimmer, it sort of like warps their DNA. It starts to affect them. And this score, which was composed by Ben Salisbury and Jeff Barrow, who I know best as being a member of Portishead, they have created a composition in music for this film that really mirrors that warped, you know,

being sort of overtaken by alien forces, unknown forces in the music itself. And this song, The Alien, it actually comes quite late in the movie during a really intense part of the film that I won't spoil. But it has this little moment in it where you hear this warped synth sound that they also used in the trailer for the movie, that ever since I've heard it, I've just sort of referred to it as the Annihival. sound. It's like the score is kind of like folding in on itself. Oh, yeah. It's like a ripple, it's like a ripple, you know? And there's just something about the natural aspects of the score, the strings, as you said, the voices, the biblical voices, and then these like synth moments that mimic the bridge in the movie between the unnatural

and the natural world that's occurring. It's really incredible. I love their work. They've done a lot of Alex Garland films. They did men. The score for men is really good. Oh, maybe I should have picked that one. It's so good. They most recently did the Alex Garland film. Civil War.

They scored that. So good. You know, Alex Garland, I think of him all the time because you think about life accomplishments and, you know, he's made these films and everything. But, you know, he will go down as someone who completely revolutionized an entire genre of film and storytelling in a way that sparked this. entire massive industry that built up to support it. And that is he had a very simple little idea.

He thought one day, what if zombies were really fast? Instead of lumbering around like they've always been portrayed. So he writes 28 days later and where these zombies are really, really fast. Now, zombies in old movies and TV shows are really, really fast. And it's just because he just had this simple little idea. Huh. Why, you know, zombies just kind of always stumble around. How could that be scary?

What if they were really fast? And that's, yeah. Million dollar idea. Million dollar idea. So much more music that we could play. You and I, when we began to compile our short list of things that we want to talk about, we realized we could do a show that's three or four or five hours long. Unfortunately.

Yeah. Talking about all this stuff. But let's just do one more. and this is from another Ari Aster film, which I actually liked more than Hereditary, and that is the film Midsomer. Did you not like Midsomer as much as Hereditary? I didn't love it as much as Hereditary.

No, I think Hereditary is a better movie. Well, so we'll take this part offline and have a little side conversation. Midsomer is just a little close to home, you know, as someone who grew up. No, I'm kidding. It takes place in Sweden. Bobby Krillick did the score for it for people who don't know Bobby Krillick

He is in this band Or it's sort of his His alter ego is the hacks and cloak And he has this incredible range As an artist He did this very brilliant, fun Groove-heavy score for the TV series Beef. I think that was just last year

And then he also can do horror films Like Midsomber The film, it's categorized Midsomers categorized as a folk horror film which is the same label given the witch. It takes place in the present. Mid-Summer takes place in the present, but it is set in this remote part of Sweden

during this festival where they celebrate the summer solstice with these ancient traditions. So it has a very fulky, but very creepy, ancient sound to it. So this cut that I want to play from it is called Gassed. And we'll go out on this feel-good hit. This real feel-good song. Get your dancing shoes on. Get ready.

Well, thank you so much, Hazel. Like I said, I sincerely have been waiting all year to do this episode with you. I knew you were the perfect person to do this with. Thank you for having me. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.