The Phantom Carriage

Composing for Silent Film offers insight, information, and techniques for contemporary composition, arrangement, and live score performance for period silent film. A specialized music composition guide, this book complements existing film scoring and contemporary music composition texts. This book helps today’s composers better understand and correctly interpret period silent film, and to create and perform live scores that align with films’ original intentions, so that audiences notice and grasp fine points of the original film.

A masterpiece of silent film, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) was first seen in 1922. Just over a century later, in February 2023, Nosferatu was screened in Zurich with a new 90-minute score by the American film composer Christopher Young, whose name is closely linked with the horror genre.

A forbidding and gothic new score by Christopher Young (Hellraiser, Species, Urban Legend, The Grudge, The Exorcism of Emily Rose) for the F.W. Murnau classic 1922 silent-movie Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, one of the most influential films of all time and one that continues to cast its long shadow across the horror movie genre even still. The perfect match of composer and movie.The recording of this new score was made with Frank Strobel, conductor, Saya Hashino, organ, and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich.

Well known for directing many great films in all genres in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, including NOT OF THIS EARTH, BUCKET OF BLOOD, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and many great adaptations of the stories of Edgar Allen Poe starring Vincent Price and Boris Karloff, not to mention launching the careers of many people in the industry, Corman stepped back from his directing duties to focus on producing films. FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND was a film with a modest budget and a very ambitious story and while the final film received mixed reviews at the time of its release, there is no question that one of the wisest decisions made during production was to hire composer Carl Davis to score the film. Carl Davis has made significant contributions to film and TV music, in the roles of composer, arranger and conductor. As an American living in Britain, he has found himself film and television work on both sides of the Atlantic. For television, he has done a number of historical dramas and big productions such as the HOLLYWOOD documentary series. For film, his score for THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN is highly regarded.