ROBIN CAROLAN
Nosferatu OST (Sacred Bones)
Nosferatu might have been overshadowed as the visual standard bearer for the classic cinematic vampire by the likes of Hammer Horror, but the 1922 classic has continued to cast a long one over gothic horror. In Robert Eggers’ new version of the film, released in the dead of winter 2024/25, this shadow is literal, spreading across a bird’s eye view of the Eastern European city the creature infects: the 19th-century metropolis swallowed whole by an ancient evil.
There’s a feeling of queasy weightlessness in this sequence, aided greatly by Robin Carolan’s OST. Though music has been added to Nosferatu since its initial release, such as for its 100th anniversary, the original is a silent film, giving Carolan perhaps the only position on Eggers’ production that doesn’t have a point of direct comparison.
Carolan, who previously collaborated with Eggers for the OST to his Viking epic The Northman, brings with him the primality and textural dread he achieved on that soundtrack (with help from Letty Stott), tempered this time by moments of softer lyricism evocative of this latest film’s time period. He explains: “I wanted to really lean into the melancholy, tragic aspect of the tale, and even make room for something akin to romance, albeit a very warped kind of romanticism.”
At 51 tracks, albeit most of them only around the two-minute mark, it’s a listening experience akin to floating down a deep, dark hole while being occasionally grabbed by hands from unknown sources: a gliding, richly orchestral score of superbly varied string work, from traditionally lilting to modern, atonal scratching, unnerving horn blasts and rumbling percussion like a coming storm, interspersed by choruses of violent whispers, occult chanting and lamenting wails. There’s nothing as catchy as the likes of Psycho’s violins or The Exorcist’s Tubular Bells. Still, Carolan’s work, as appropriately disturbing as it is at times, goes beyond the confines of the cinema screen to become a roaming, insatiable beast of full-blooded classical music by itself. The Nosferatu OST is a remarkable, highly emotive achievement that’ll sweep you up into the jaws of Eggers’ monster like another of his transfixed victims.
words HANNAH COLLINS
