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Unholy Melodies: Composer Robin Carolan on Nosferatu‘s Score
Nosferatu For Robin Carolan, working on his debut film score for Robert Eggers’s 2022 Viking epic The Northman was a “baptism by fire.” After closing his influential electronic record label Tri Angle in 2020, Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough (who records music under the name Vessel) dove headfirst into researching the ethnography of Nordic music to craft the film’s harsh, mythic sound. They used traditional Nordic instruments and modern experimental techniques to approximate the music of the era, a mandate Eggers routinely insists upon for his period genre films.
That directive continues with Eggers’s longtime passion project, Nosferatu, a new telling of the famous vampire story that draws from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Expressionist classic and Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, for which Carolan returns as the now-sole composer. Like Murnau’s film, Nosferatu is set in 1838 in the fictional German town of Wisborg; thus, the score’s inspirations were comparatively much more straightforward than The Northman. “Rob and I would talk about the classical music of the period, mostly typified by a lot of Romanticism,” notes Carolan. “This is the time of Wagner and Beethoven.”
Eggers’s commitment to period accuracy persists unabated. Though the film features “a little bit of electronic sound design,” the eerie operatic score is the product of densely mixed instrumentation with an emphasis on “weird sounds [created] with pretty traditional instruments.” Carolan’s music achieves the intended effect of imbuing Eggers’s film with a quiet dread that slowly roars into cacophonous terror, embodying Count Orlok’s development from a shadowy figure of nightmares to a plague-spreading menace.
As with The Northman, Carolan began writing Nosferatu’s score with the help of playlists. “Robert and I build up huge playlists of music that we like—some are literally three days long. I spend ages walking around and sifting through it all to try to get ideas. I always carry around a Dictaphone, so any time I have some sort of melodic idea, I just hum and store all these hums, then make notes about them and how I think they might work.”
Carolan enters the post-production process at the very beginning, preceded by the aforementioned prep work, and works in parallel with editor Louise Ford, who has cut all of Eggers’s features. He worked out of AIR Studios alongside Daniel Elms, who was part of the orchestration team and helped bring Carolan’s ideas to life. “I’m very honest about how I’m not a super tech-y person. I get frustrated if I can’t move very quickly on an idea that I’ve got. I need someone like Dan, who is a wizard about that stuff and can effectively get it done.”
When Carolan first came on board, Eggers gave him a list of 12 scenes to prioritize and start writing for immediately. (“For him, they’re the most important scenes, or scenes where he’s maybe not sure what he wants to do with them.”) Carolan tried to get those across to him within the first two weeks before moving on to smaller or more transitional moments. “Quite quickly, the bones of the score are there. Then, it’s just months of rewriting and changing as the film changes. It helps that I go in already thinking about it a lot. I’ll obsessively read the script and come up with a lot of ideas just off of that.”
Whenever a big sting occurs on Nosferatu’s score and overwhelms the imagery, the sheer number of musicians that passed through AIR during recording sessions registers immediately. Throughout the process, the musicians Carolan oversaw included 60 string players, a 40-person choir, ten brass players, a woodwind player and a harpist. He employed six orchestrators to put together the music and incorporated the work of Letty Stott, who specializes in “weird, ancient obscure pipes and horns” and collaborated with Eggers on The Northman.
Eggers privileges a loud sound design, something Carolan was occasionally hesitant about: “I can deal with a lot of heavy music, but it can be quite punishing. Sometimes, I’ve had to look at him a bit like the Spinal Tap scene: You’re turning it up to 11?” However, it was important that audiences tune into the dialogue, which often features foreign accents and languages. “You have to assume that it’s not going to be easy for everyone to understand what the actors or characters are saying. He’s really keen to get that balance of sound design and dialogue and music just right so that nothing overpowers the other. Mixing notes are often about that: everything loud when there’s no dialogue, then turn everything way down when there is dialogue.”
Besides period influences, Eggers was inspired by more modern composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, Béla Bartók and Iannis Xenakis. Carolan’s experimental music background—Tri Angle put out acclaimed avant-electronic records such as The Haxan Cloak’s Excavation and Forest Sounds’s Engravings—helped bring some of Nosferatu’s stranger aural indications of Orlok’s spirit, to the forefront. “One of the things that I knew was really important about the score was that we don’t really see Orlok a lot, but it’s really important that it signals he is present even when he’s not visible. I was constantly trying to find subtle ways to do that. So, I had the strings play this spiral motif because I wanted this sort of really hypnotic, crazy and disturbing sound, and this spiral felt perfect for that.”
Similarly, Carolan oversaw an “experimental cello session” to create the sound of a sleep apnea fit, a motif that recurs throughout the film but features particularly prominently in two sections involving Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult): first, when he’s moving through Orlok’s castle, and second, during an emotional showdown with his disturbed, possessed wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Both of these scenes are designed to resemble a waking nightmare. “I have sleep apnea, and I know what that sounds like,” Carolan explains. “In a dream, it sounds like you’re screaming, but in reality, you’re actually making this really weird guttural moan, almost as if it’s in slow motion. There’s this BBC ghost story called Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), and it has a scene that perfectly captures that sleep apnea sound. I just played the cellist this clip and asked, ‘Can you do this?’ It took some work, and it was weird to begin with, but it was amazing.”
Other times, Carolan gave players more expansive direction, as with young violinist Daniel Pioro, a frequent collaborator of Jonny Greenwood. “He was first chair and did a lot of solos. Because I don’t need to tell him how to play an instrument, I basically wanted to get him into the mindset of the characters. I would instruct him to play as if he’s a Victorian. I wanted the emotional stuff to always sound a little bit chilly and a bit reserved. It was important that the violin solos have that.”
Even in its showier passages, much of the score retains that restrained feel, like when Carolan and Eggers deploy chants, which the director wrote in the ancient language Dacian, spoken in a region that corresponds mostly to present day Romania, with the help of consultant Florin Lăzărescu. The notable exception is the score’s final eight-minute section, which soundtracks Hutter’s climactic race against the clock to save his wife from Orlok’s deadly embrace. The “fucked-up wedding music,” per Carolan’s description, has a lushly elegiac tone that serves as a deliberate romantic break from the score’s otherwise disquieting tone. “I think that was the one I was most worried about going into it, because I knew that that was going to have to be like everything and the fucking kitchen sink,” he explains. “There’s a lot going on in that scene as well, so it’s constantly moving emotionally. I was terrified that I was going to write something that just felt really sappy or stupid. I tried to make this score as emotional as I could without it feeling saccharine. I always wanted there to be a chilliness to the sound even when it is scoring what’s supposed to be quite an emotional scene.”
Carolan has already gone through multiple acts in his career—curator, promoter, contributor to the influential blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats, label owner—but he’s only starting his work as a film composer. From his two experiences, he’s learned not to take rejection too personally (“If you write something and you think it sounds beautiful, it might be, but if it doesn’t work for the film, you have to not get too upset about it”) and to balance masochistic impulses with levity (“When I was in the room with Dan, we were just laughing the whole time”).
Mostly, he’s happy that his first experience in film production was on a project as intense and prolonged as The Northman, which he describes as “a stressful learning curve” that ultimately helped his work on Nosferatu. “The Northman was one of the first big studio movies that went back into production in that first year of COVID. We had to make that movie under really strict restrictions, and it made everything really complicated. There was this constant sense of uncertainty. How much longer are we going to be continuing? Are we going to go back into lockdown? Rob had also never directed a film of that scale with that amount of money. For him and his team of regular collaborators, I think it was all a bit of an experiment. If we hadn’t gone through that project, I don’t know how smooth Nosferatu would have been.”
