Composer Colin Stetson’s music has unsettled audiences in everything from “Hereditary” to “The Menu” and the “Red Dead Redemption” video games, but he tries never to step in the same haunted well twice. His score for the Netflix horror miniseries “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” may start in a place that could give some “Hereditary” fans deja vu — low winds and eerie saxophone arpeggios — but he wanted to build a musical language that could grow into something radically different, alongside the twists poor Rachel Harkin (Camilla Morrone) has to deal with in the week leading up to her wedding with Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco).
“I really don’t go for a Frankenstein construction; there has to be a cohesive throughline,” Stetson told IndieWire. “How do we weave disparate elements together and make it so that they’re all of an ilk? I think because of the nature of the left turns in the show, I wanted to start in a place musically that was a bit more familiar, maybe, closer to my work in the past that people would identify with, so that when we switch gears, it’s really remarkable not just from a story perspective but from a sonic perspective and the overall aesthetic.”
The pilot script, written by Haley Z. Boston, Alana B. Lytle, and Ben Bolea, immediately fired Stetson up to seek a sonic perspective that blended the familiar and the strange, blending lo-fi sensibilities with a sometimes violent momentum and choruses of instruments we normally don’t hear together in concert. By taking roads not quite so well-traveled, musically, Stetson felt he could approach the knotty, complicated questions that “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” asks about relationships and how deeply we can ever truly know others.
“Many things are set up in the first episode that are paid off in ways which are far more satisfying on a human level than maybe your standard idea of where you think a horror [show] is going. That’s what I’m drawn to, and on a lot of different projects: Is there real humanity in this, or is this a monster movie?”
On reading the pilot script, Stetson almost immediately gravitated towards three musical pillars that would allow him to write a score that is as twisted and twisting as the miniseries itself. He wanted to evoke a natural element, given how much of the show takes place in a cabin, and so much of the percussion comes from tree creaking. He gravitated to the Mellotron, a kind of electronic keyboard played onto magnetic tape, for the main thematic ideas. Stetson also gathered a lot of woodwinds, particularly clarinets, as a counterpoint to the trees and as a voice for the icy, violent dread that hangs over the Harkin-Cunningham nuptials.
“I get a sense of what I want the main instrumentation to be, usually three centers, and then I’ll have several days of just tracking. I’ll just set things recording, and I’ll play. I think about what the scenes are in my head, based on the script, and just go go go go go go. Then, later, it’s about sifting through and seeing what really lands,” Stetson said. “The main elements, though, weave things all together, whether they’re leaning in one very, very distinctive direction or another.”
One of the joys of “Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen” is that Stetson got to take some very big musical swings in very, very distinctive directions, going more synth for Episode 7, and then tying the score into a unified knot in the Episode 8 finale. While Stetson wrote most of the score in advance of ever seeing picture, allowing the miniseries’ directors to get a sense of the vibe well in advance, the composer wrote to picture for the final episodes, and played all of the instruments himself. “The music has a lot of heaving lifting to do,” Stetson said.
But that effort is part of the draw for Stetson. “When I do something, there’s really no hemming and hawing. I read [the script], and I go, ‘Yes, I would like to do this. I have something already in my head. Let’s go.’”
“Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen” is streaming on Netflix.
