Charlie Clouser is a name that should be very familiar to horror fans. On top of being a member of the highly influential and regarded industrial group Nine Inch Nails, he’s also the man who composed the music to some of the most loved horror titles in the past 15 years. From Saw to Dead Silence, Death Sentence to “American Horror Story”, Clouser’s work has sent chills throughout the horror audience in some of the most intense and exhilarating movies, his aural companions becoming iconic themes that conjure memories the moment the first few notes are played.

We got the opportunity to ask Charlie several questions about his works throughout the years as well as his more recent works, such as “Wayward Pines” and the upcoming “Childhood’s End”. We also wondered about the instruments he considers to be vital in his compositions as well as which theoretical remake he would love to score.

You can purchase the “Wayward Pines” OST iTunes. Also, make sure to follow Charlie on Twitter.

You’re confirmed to compose the music for ‘Childhood’s End’. What can you tell us about that project and how you envision the music feeling?

Childhood’s End is a pretty epic story, dealing heavily with religion and morality, so I knew the score wouldn’t be just some light ambient stuff.  I tried to give the score an underpinning of dread, because as the story progresses mankind as a whole does experience a “cosmic redemption”, but there’s a lot of heartbreak along the way for the individual characters too.  There’s three main melodic themes that relate to each other and towards the end of the story start to converge, revealing that they have more in common than you’d think at the beginning.  There’s a lot of upward motion in the melodies and chord progressions, to mimic mankind’s “ascent to the cosmos”, which is what the story centers on.  A lot of the sounds are dark and girthy, with a lot of low brass, bowed pianos, and a couple of pretty terrifying atonal choir pieces that I’ve managed to work in there as well.  The score doesn’t have a lot of synthesizer in there, most of the sounds are derived from bowed metals, brass sections, and choirs, but often they’re so processed that they might sound more electronic than organic.  I wanted to keep things sounding warm, wide, and open, as opposed to something like a SAW film, where everything sounds cold and claustrophobic, and where the melodies and chord progressions are always headed downwards, evoking a feeling of being pulled down into dark places.  This kind of thinking always affects how I structure the melodies and chord voicings, so for this project I’ve used wider intervals and more expansive, rising melodic structures that will hopefully mirror the scope of the story, whereas on something like a SAW film I’d keep the voicings and intervals tight and close to mimic the claustrophobic feel of being trapped in some horrific dungeon.

I listened to the soundtrack for ‘Wayward Pines’ and it’s incredibly moody and almost distant, as though each instrument has to travel a distance before reaching the listener. Am I just hearing things or is there something to what I’m describing?

I’m glad you could hear that distant quality in the Wayward Pines score, because that’s definitely a feeling I wanted the music to have.  It’s not just a matter of soaking everything in reverb, which might wind up making it sound like it’s happening in an underground parking garage.  It comes down to making sounds that have that distant quality built in, but it’s also about picking chord voicings and intervals that help with that haunting, distant feel.  I used a lot of minor seconds and thirds, and lots of downward modulations to try to give that feeling of being pulled down into an uncomfortable place.  I’m always more attracted to sounds that have a distant, murky character, like the broken-up and wobbly sound of a jet plane flying far overhead.  I do have a few sound processing techniques that can help get me there, things like vocoders and old busted phase shifters, but they’re not the whole story, they’re kind of the icing on top.  Throughout much of that series, Matt Dillon’s character is trying to pry his way inside what’s really going on in the town, so I wanted the score to be somewhere off in the distance, like its back is turned to him and the audience.  I also used a few sounds that weren’t quite in tune with each other, or had a slightly unsteady pitch, so that things sounded a little uneasy and unsettling, but as the story progresses and Matt’s character takes charge, some of those elements go away and both the sounds and chord structures get more confident and firm.

Your compositions have resulted in two of the most iconic themes of the current horror generation: “Hello Zepp” and the ‘American Horror Story’ theme song. How do you look back on those pieces and what do you think of them currently?

It’s funny, because both of those themes were done very quickly, so I guess in those cases, a pressing deadline was actually a good thing.  I’m glad that “Hello Zepp” has taken on a life of its own, especially because it was from the very first film I ever scored.  It seems that those kind of memorable themes are more prevalent in the horror genre, like John Carpenter’s “Halloween” theme, or the Mike Oldfield piece in “The Exorcist”, so I’m grateful to James Wan for making the kind of films in which that kind of theme can work, and for giving me the opportunity to sink my teeth into such meaty subject matter.  It was great that “Hello Zepp” became sort of a trademark element of the “SAW” films, because I got to do seven different versions of it over the years, each one longer and more epic than the last, and I had a blast changing it up and adding new sections every year.
 
The theme for “American Horror Story” owes a lot to my co-writer on that one, Cesar Davila-Irizarry, who long ago had done a track that was used as temp music as they were cutting the title sequence to AHS, and because it was such a good track I wound up incorporating a lot of what he had done many years ago into my version.  Even though I wrote three or four demo themes of my own at the beginning of that project, we all kept coming back to Cesar’s version and loving the unsteady, gritty feel that it had.  So in the end it became a collaboration between us, even though there was a gap of ten or fifteen years between his original track and my version, and that’s why I was happy to share the writing credit for the theme.  I look back on both of those themes as pretty strong moments, and it’s gratifying to see that they’ve resonated with people.

What are some instruments or tools that you consider indispensable in creating your unique sound?

I rely pretty heavily on some unusual guitars, like the Paul Vo Moog guitars that are now discontinued, and the Adrian Belew signature model Parker guitar.  All of those have various methods of electronically self-vibrating the strings, similar to the sounds you can get from an e-bow, which I also use quite a bit.  These instruments let you create sustained, droning textures that are somewhere between a guitar and a synthesizer, and by processing them through pitch shifters and delay units I can get some really scary tones that don’t sound too electronic.  For instance, all of the evil drone textures on the SAW movies came from guitars, although I do still have a good collection of synths from back in the day and some of the more modern ones like Dave Smith’s Pro-2, which is a nasty and aggressive little beast.  I’m also into cheap circuit-bent instruments, like modified Casio samplers and hacked Alesis drum machines.  In fact, the weird little digital percussion sounds in “Hello Zepp” came from one of those circuit-bent Alesis drum machines.  I’ve also gotten into the world of EuroRack modular synths pretty heavily over the last few years, and it seems like every month there’s more wild modules coming out, so going down that road has been hazardous to my bank account.  These modular systems are a great way to build a setup that is targeted to exactly what you want to do, although it can take time and experimentation to get what you’re after.  With this type of instrument many happy accidents are likely to happen, so whenever I sit down behind them I make sure I’m always recording.  I still have my original Moog modular system that I bought cheaply in the 1980s, when nobody wanted them, and even though it’s more than 45 years old it still has its own chunky sound that I love.

I also am a big fan of bowed metal instruments, and I have one of Richard Waters’ original Waterphones, as well as a few homemade gadgets that are similar.  I’ve made a few crude instruments like some stainless and aluminum sheets with bolts attached at the nodal points which can be bowed to create sustained tones, and these always have a scary and haunting feel.  I’m down for any hunk of metal that can be scraped or bowed to make a sound that resembles a pitched note, and if the sound is unsteady or wobbles or breaks up then that’s even better. 

You’ve composed music for movies, TV shows, and with artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Rob Zombie, and Marilyn Manson, among others. Are there other mediums that you’d like to create music for?

These days I go back and forth between movies and TV, and I can’t really walk away from either medium, since they both have good and bad aspects.  Working in TV can be nice because you’ve got to work fast, so you don’t have half-finished tracks lying around for months, but there’s not always a lot of time for sonic experimentation.  But lately I think I’m becoming more attracted to the schedule of scoring for movies, where I can take a little more time to develop the themes and spend some long nights in the studio finding new sounds.  I’ve also done a bit of music for video games here and there, and I may jump back on that horse at some point since that world is really open to experimentation and they seem really receptive to unconventional approaches to music.

When you compose music, what sorts of emotions and messages do you try to convey?

I do love a good opportunity to inject a sense of dread and foreboding, that feeling that something bad is about to happen, which seems to occur a lot in the kind of projects I wind up doing.  On the other hand, when I’m dealing with a scene that’s got some genuine, tender emotion, if I can get it right that’s also very satisfying.  Sometimes it’s those gentle, emotional cues with the fewest elements that can be the most difficult and challenging to get right.
In general I’m always looking for opportunities to add weight to the character’s history, to sort of look outside the timeline of the scene and take into account what happened to the characters that put them in these situations, and give the viewer the impression that there’s more to the story than meets the eye.  I guess I try to look for the emotion that lies underneath or behind what’s written on the character’s faces.  Obviously, a lot of the time you’ve got to be “on the nose” and reinforce what the characters are feeling, but to me, the most interesting and challenging music often comes from those scenes where I can score the backstory, or have the music give a premonition of what’s to come.  This kind of approach only works in a few situations, but when it’s appropriate it can be really satisfying if I get it right.  I always hope that this will help to create a more complete and complex experience that has more depth and layers than just always playing directly to what we’re seeing.

You’ve worked very frequently with horror titles. How do you feel those differ from other genres and what kind of mindset do you have to put yourself in so as to create a horror score?

It seems that music in the horror genre has a couple of aspects that other genres don’t focus on quite so much, like the use of strong, memorable themes or hooks that become trademarks of the story, like the classic horror themes I was talking about before, and also the use of some pretty extreme orchestral and sound design stuff.  I love atonal, dissonant, and chaotic sounds, whether they come from an orchestra, a choir, or some piece of software, and it seems that in the horror genre there’s more of an “anything goes” attitude when it comes to that kind of extreme music and sound design.  I love the work of composers like Gyorgy Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki, and that atonal mayhem seems to be more appropriate in the horror genre than in less extreme films.  I also think that the type of industrial and electronic music I did during my years in the record industry suits the horror genre as well, so I’m able to call on that experience and bring some of those techniques to the table, where that approach might not work as well in some other types of films. 

There are tons of remakes and reboots happening these days. What are some films that, were they to receive the reboot/remake treatment, you’d hope to be chosen as the composer for?

That’s a tough one, because so many of my favorite movies are what I consider sacred ground that should never be touched, like Kubrick’s version of “The Shining” – a remake of that could never live up to the original, and I’d hate to be the composer who has to try and improve upon that amazing score.  But if I had to choose, I’d love to take a stab at the more thoughtful science fiction classics and political thrillers from back in the day.  I know they’ve rebooted Michael Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain” at least once, but that’s still one of my favorites, and has a fantastic score that was one of the first all-electronic scores I’d ever heard, so that would have to be on my list.  Lately I’ve been rewatching lots of my favorites from the seventies, like “Three Days of the Condor”, “The French Connection”, and “Marathon Man”.  Those movies that the reviews refer to as “a taut thriller” are really satisfying to me as a viewer, and would be challenging and rewarding to score, because I wouldn’t automatically know exactly the right way to solve the musical problems.  Searching for a musical solution is where the fun part is, for me at least, and unfamiliar territory is usually more satisfying to explore.

How do you challenge yourself to keep creating new and fresh music?
 

I try to keep finding new instruments that I’ve never played before, and hopefully coax something useful out of them.  For example, I recently got a guzheng, which is a Chinese stringed instrument similar to a koto.  It takes a lifetime to master in the context of traditional Chinese music, and even though I can only play it in a basic and pretty clumsy manner, I love the tone of the thing and I was able to use it quite a bit on Wayward Pines.  I played it with a guitar pick and a violin bow, and although it certainly didn’t wind up sounding like it does in the traditional context, it worked really well for adding some rhythmic tension without sounding synthetic.  That’s a good example of finding an instrument that I can’t play all that well and finding something in it that resonates with what I’m doing.  I guess unfamiliar territory is more fun for me.  Picture a Sherpa who’s leading an expedition up Everest; he knows every route to the top, where all the footholds and safe paths are, so for him it’s just another day at the office.  But the first-time climber on the expedition is thrilled with every step he takes that doesn’t result in a fall to the death.  I think I’d rather feel more like the first-time climber than the Sherpa, so I try to look for unfamiliar paths or mountains I haven’t climbed yet.