BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Something doesn’t feel right. Your heartbeat quickens, and your muscles tense. You raise your hands in front of your eyes, peaking through the smallest gap. (After all, you don’t really want to miss the horror unfolding on the screen.)
Then… bam!
The music pierces your ears, and you leap out of your skin.
And that was a successful jump scare — a cinematic technique that’s simultaneously overused and impossible to beat in horror films. To composers like Mark Buys, the jump scare is nuanced; it must balance script and score, and works best when it’s unexpected.
Mark, of music production house Play Pause Record, worked this nuance into Australian horror film Surrogate, with additional music from Matt Boden. To Mark, a horror soundtrack should unsettle you — whether that means pulling your body into a jump scare, or creeping you out on a psychological level. He tells CutCommon how it all works.
Mark, how’d you get into scoring Surrogate?
Having lost touch for many years, director David Willing and I bumped into each other at a local bakery, where he was hanging out writing, in conjunction with Beth King, what turned out to be the script for Surrogate. Across many months, we caught up for coffee just shooting the sh*t and talking all things filmmaking.
When David was looking for film funding, I was able to connect him, through a friend, with executive producer Konfir Kabo, who took a liking to the script. A few months later, at another of our coffee catch-ups, David told me he’d secured funding and wondered if I’d like to score it.
At the thought of scoring David’s first feature film, a script that I’d read and loved, my answer was ‘maybe’.
Just kidding, of course I said ‘yes’!
So what were your first impressions of the film and narrative?
As mentioned, I’d read the script well before David had found funding. He and Beth had done a great job, and the narrative played out clearly and concisely to the extent that, once greenlit, co-composer Matt Boden and I fluidly wrote 20 minutes of music to scenes from the script months before the shoot. Intended as demo material presenting a possible direction for the score, it turned out David loved the demos so much he’d given them to Kestie Morassi, star of Surrogate, so that she could listen to them in preparation for her role.
When we saw the first cut of the film, it was very clear the film was strong. All department heads had put their best foot forward, and I also came to realise what a great actor Kestie Morassi is. She’s in 103 of 105 scenes in the film, and there is such detail to her performance, both physically and emotionally. Her performance propels the story, and allows the music to function as an additional character or to speak for her when she was present but silent on screen. As far as film scoring goes, it doesn’t get much better than that.
A lot of horror films have jump scares, and these are so heavily influenced by the music. What’s your take on the jump scare? Do you think it’s scary, and did you use any jump scares in Surrogate?
It’s funny you should ask about jump scares, as it was a conversation point between David and I many times during our coffee catch-ups. As a reaction to the frequent use and overuse of jump scares in current-day horror films, David wanted to savour them in Surrogate. Spoiler alert: there are only two. But for a 90-minute ghost horror in 2022, that’s almost unheard of. With so few of them baked into the film, it meant we could focus on the psychological drama unfolding for the characters.
And in answer to your additional question, are jump scares actually scary or effective? Absolutely. But I think you only get the full effect when they are truly unexpected. As such, they need to be set up correctly in the script and in conjunction with music, and executed well on screen.
If we — the audience — can guess them, they become less potent. With lots of them in a film, it’s more like a drinking game: who can guess the jump scare? Silence, silence, silence, blaam!
I defy anyone to stay sober playing that game through a James Wan horror.
Talk us through the instrumentation, and how you worked to find the scariest sound for Surrogate.
Let me answer the latter question first: scary sounds in music don’t exist. It’s all to do with context.
In horror scores, a sprinkle of dissonance, some unusual timbres, and honestly the audience’s imagination does all the heavy lifting. A twisted irony being that, for example, Penderecki’s string writing techniques for him created sacred sounds for use amongst other things, in his religious music. But they got appropriated into genre films and now we have this wonderful trope to work with.
Practically speaking, the Surrogate instrumentation is low woodwinds, percussion, choir breaths, and strings. When I was younger, I worked as an assistant for Hollywood composer and horror score master Christopher Young. As a homage to him, I took this familiar palette and made it my own. It’s also somewhat of a throwback to horror film scores from the ’70s through ’90s, and we took the punt that horror fans might recognise it and welcome it like an old friend.
That said, a timbre palette is only half of the equation. Any composer who tries their hand at writing ‘horror music’ will quickly realise, once you’ve played out all of your favourite clichés, the real work begins.
On this point, I remember Chris Young referring to the textural and aleatoric moments in a horror score as ‘mumbo-jumbo’, but this labelling is a ruse implying it’s easy to create these jumbled sounds. In actual fact, dig into Chris’ work and you can see he exerts huge effort and creative acumen to produce variety in textures and colours at any given moment.
I heeded that lesson long ago, and wasn’t at all surprised when the real work kicked in scoring Surrogate.
Let’s talk timing. It must be easy to edge towards ‘too much’ when you are building suspense for the viewer. How do you compose with patience and restraint when you know what’s coming, but still need to allow the audience to build up their own anticipation and fear?
When we listen to music synchronised to picture, it’s in real time, and so it’s natural to assume that composers work this out linearly and in real time. The reality, for me anyway, is I work in small increments from the macro to the micro, with actual music being the last thing I engage with.
The macro is me watching a scene with no music, and deliberately trying not to imagine music to the scene. I focus on finding the interesting and pivotal moments in the drama, which helps me to work out the overall pacing and placement of a cue. This creates a basic roadmap for the music.
Then comes the micro – writing the music.
We also took a specific approach to music placement and timing for Surrogate in that we deliberately wanted the audience to have opportunity to make up their own mind on how to feel or react throughout the film, and not be emotionally dictated to by the music. This meant we would often hold back and wait a theatrical ‘beat’ before the music started or shifted, giving the audience more space to experience the emotional journey for themselves.
Sometimes though, a scene can be far scarier without music. How do you know when music is needed, or better left unwritten?
There is no absolute answer to this question; it can be effective either way. But the deciding factor is the stylistic choice of the director. Some prefer lots of music, and others not. ‘Never say never’ is a good motto in this regard. For example, Alfred Hitchcock clearly stated to Bernard Herrmann not to score the shower scene in Psycho (1960). Bennie did it anyway, and the rest is history.
In the case of Surrogate, it was very clear from the beginning that we were going for a less-is-more approach. This gave David scope when working with sound designer Sasha Zastavnikovic to bring the sound design into focus at key moments. Case in point: for a pivotal sequence in Surrogate, David had found inspiration for sound design and music in the exorcism scene from The Excorcist (1973), but we weren’t sure if this approach was going to work. To give us the biggest set of options, I wrote music for the entire 7-minute sequence, ebbing and flowing with the drama. David and I revised this material to a point at which we were happy. Later, sound design was added, and it became clear that music wasn’t necessary for much of the sequence.
Was this scene ‘scary’ without music? Yes, absolutely. Did the scene work with the music throughout? Yes, but it made for a different experience — ultimately one that didn’t feel right for what we were trying to achieve.
You composed this score with additional music by Australian pianist, orchestrator, and composer Matt Boden (pictured below). How do you navigate that collaborative process when you’re co-composing a soundtrack — especially when horror is an experience we all tend to ‘feel’ differently?
Matt and I have worked together for a very long time, writing, orchestrating, and recording music. With that comes a familiarity and trust.
In co-composing with someone, it’s not about having exactly the same instinct. We give each other the space to interpret a scene and music for that scene in our own ways.
Like me, Matt works macro to micro, and so it’s possible to stop at various points along the way and discuss what’s going on, bounce off each other, and observe if a cue is working or not. For me personally, I find this incredibly helpful. It means I can get a fresh perspective on what I’m writing before I present it to a director.
Writing a cue, we all go snow-blind at some point, having focused on its detail so intensely. So it’s really helpful to phone a friend and say, ‘hey what do you think?’.
What would your advice be to other composers looking to score a horror film?
First up, don’t do it if you’re not into genre films. They can be confronting, and you’re going to see the same scenes over and over again for weeks on end. If you’ve got a weak stomach, don’t torture yourself!
Bone up on the nuances of dissonance. As a composer, you’ll need to practice and become intimately familiar with scales and intervals you’d otherwise assume to avoid.
Whatever the instrument palette you decide upon, you’ll quickly use up all your favourite clichés, at which point, be prepared to work hard finding and creating combinations of timbres, stasis, and textures, and using every possible tessitura available to you.
Finally, as best you can, enjoy the journey and the destination. There will be more work involved than you originally anticipated. Just keep going. You will, at the 80 per cent point of every cue, think it’s all crap and question your decision to be a composer in the first place. Just keep going. Ditto at the 80 per cent mark for the entire project. Just keep going. You will be asked to revise cues beyond what your ego thinks is reasonable. Just keep going.
And that music cue you thought was pure genius that got cut? Don’t worry, that’s what soundtrack albums are for!
Learn more about Australian horror film Surrogate, and follow Mark Buys’ projects on Play Pause Record. The original motion picture soundtrack is now available on Spotify.
Surrogate stills and images supplied. Featured image: Ellie Stewart as Ava in Surrogate.
