ABOUT

Rose: A Love Story by award-winning director Jennifer Sheridan is a feature film that I scored that offers a fresh and unique approach to the vampire/horror genre. The film premiered at BFI Film Festival 2020 and was nominated for a BIFA the same year.

Filmed in Wales in the remote woodland outskirts of a secluded town, Rose and Sam live hidden away from the rest of society and battle with a mysterious and lethal illness that plagues Rose’s life. When an uninvited guest appears out of the blue, the couple are forced to break their solitude, something that threatens to unleash the violent horror of Rose’s condition. The film is a dark, claustrophobic and all-engulfing horror experience that illustrates how far people are willing to go to protect their loved ones.

When approaching Rose, Jennifer wanted me to take a very subtle approach to the score so that the acting would highlight the loving yet tense and almost ominous relationship between the two protagonists. Shifting between feelings that Rose is being kept at home against her will vs her partner Sam protecting her was key and to do that Jennifer wanted me to create feelings of 'claustrophobia' and 'heaviness' without overwhelming the audience and leading them too much.

To do that, I used a very simple motif on a live cello which became a key theme of the film together with drones, pads and pulsing organic synths. The character of the score also came from layering in foley recordings of things like a cooking pot bowed with a violin bow that was pitched down and recording and adding lots of effects to lentils being stirred in a bowl of water. As I felt it captured the other-worldly feel of Rose and her lust for blood, another unusual technique I used was to record my unborn daughter's heartbeat and incorporate it into the score, as can be heard in the cue 'Blood Flows'.

The micro budget for the film meant I had to be creative with how I recorded live instruments. So while there was a bit of session work like recording a cellist for various tracks and a violinist for cues like Mozart's Violin Sonata No 26, the majority came from home recording. I also recorded my wife for the vocals heard in the score which, like the cello motif, became an important theme within the film. It took a number of sessions to get the right tone for the vocals of being soft and delicate yet haunting, but I'm particularly proud of the cue 'Back Before Nightfall' which features these vocals.

Lastly, the cue 'Hunter Gatherer', found early on in the film, was one of the hardest tracks to get right. It needed to feel heavy but not ominous as this cue is an introduction to Sam and keeping the ambiguity of his character was important. Getting the delicate balance right was a challenge and there were quite a few changes on this cue to reach that point and make sure it fit Jennifer's vision.