Picture Credit: Netflix
Composer Mac Quayle brings Ed Gein’s (Charlie Hunnam) headspace to music with the latest chapter of Ryan Murphy’s Monster series. The Ed Gein Story is horrifying, of course, given its content, but Quayle and Murphy wanted to go beyond horror. Between the spine-tingling strings, they wanted humanity, not only monstrosity.
For years, Quayle and Murphy have collaborated, going all the way back to American Horror Story. The long-running horror series is what really kicked off the composer’s career, which includes Mr. Robot, The Last of Us: Part II, and Pose.
Recently, Quayle spoke with What’s on Netflix about his past and latest collaborations with Murphy, as well as how he wanted the music to communicate brokenness.
Your scores usually begin with one simple sound and then grow from there. What simple sound helped shape the score for The Ed Gein Story?
The cello. It was one of the main instruments in the show. I wrote the Ed theme first using a cello sample, and then later it was recorded with a real cello. It’s such a versatile instrument. What a range. Pitch-wise, it can go quite low. It can also play high. It can be beautiful; it can be soft and sweet. It can be loud and aggressive, and then it can be dissonant and all sound-effect-type, percussive. It’s really, really versatile.
How do you find its versatility affects other instruments in bringing them in to work with the cello?
It depends on the project and on the actual piece of music. If I’m doing something quite emotional and beautiful with the cello, then the other instruments will come in to support that, will add that right harmony or the right other textures that will support what the cello is doing. And then, by contrast, if the cello is doing something quite dissonant and aggressive, then the other instruments can join in and get crazy with it too.
When you first got offered the show, what were your initial instincts for how to score Ed Gein? What should music do and not do for this man?
On this one, I got a call and then they sent me the first episode the next day. So I immediately saw it, and then the day I had a meeting with Ryan to talk about it. There wasn’t a whole lot of time in the schedule for planning or coming up with ideas. Having worked with Ryan for 11 years, I know a lot about what he is looking for with music. I could just assume that he was going to want a horror aspect to Ed Gein.
He laid it out that, yes, this is a horror, that it needs a horror element in this music. But he also wanted something that might make us feel a little bit of compassion for this broken human — that he was a very broken man who did all these horrible things, and maybe there’s a little bit of compassion for him. He wasn’t well.
Are there any cues in particular that strive for that compassion?
I think it was the first time that I used what I call the kind of sad Ed theme — the version of his theme — and it was called “Funeral.” I think it’s a good example of the cello being very soft and emotive, very emotional. I like to think we achieved that in that scene, helping the audience feel a little bit of compassion for Ed.
As you said, Ed is a broken man, so did you want to make any broken choices with the score? Any parts of the score you wanted to damage?
I think that the score, when it was allowing the audience to feel compassion for Ed in a way, in those moments, the score really wasn’t broken. The score was probably at its most conventional, where it’s providing this emotion. But when Ed is doing these horrible acts, in a way, that’s when the score is broken — getting totally crazy, with weird sounds and off-kilter rhythms. It is not following the rules and gets quite messed up.
The track “The End” captures that chaotic feeling. How’d that end credit cue evolve?
I wrote that for the end credits of the first episode, and it’s got his theme right out of the gate — the sort of creepy version of his theme. I recorded several instruments for this: cello, violin, piano, some woodwinds like flute and clarinet, and I recorded a percussionist. The percussionist plays all kinds of interesting instruments, most of which he makes himself. That track is filled with a lot of these pieces of metal being scraped and wood being shaken and different things. All of that together just felt like the right way to end that first episode.
What’s a typical note from Ryan Murphy?
In my experience, he’s about the big picture. He won’t necessarily get super detailed about how he wants the music to change and shift here and there, but it’ll be more about, “Well, this cue needs to be more scary,” or, “This needs to be more sad.” Occasionally, he’ll come up with, “I really think we need to use a harpsichord in this score,” or something detailed, but mostly it’s those big, general notes.
When you two do American Horror Story together, you always start from scratch. Is it a similar process for Monster, or did you want threads between Dahmer and Ed Gein?
Every season of American Horror Story is different. We do start from scratch. We write all new themes, all new music, and the one thread between all of them is this sort of vocabulary for horror music, which has been evolving for decades as composers have been scoring horror films and shows.
And so, Ed was no exception. One of the things that we pulled from some of that horror vocabulary — the dissonance and unsettling sounds and sudden loud moments that make you jump, melodic and harmonic choices that are unusual and unsettling. Those types of things, I think you could say, are in all the seasons of American Horror Story, and they’re in Ed Gein. They do the job to get the audience feeling a certain way.
Given the portrayal of Alfred Hitchcock and the inclusion of Psycho in the show, was composer Bernard Herrmann on your mind?
He actually wasn’t on my mind as I was writing the music. There was no real attempt to try to be Herrmann-esque. I have done other projects where that was very intentional, to live in the Bernard Herrmann world. His music makes an appearance in the show. There’s this connection between Ed and Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho, and that makes an appearance. Some of Hermann’s actual score from Psycho is in the show.
That being said, Herrmann was a big contributor to that vocabulary of horror music. Things that he created really helped the horror soundtrack evolve. And so now, without trying to sound like Herrmann, you’ll still maybe pull from some of that vocabulary that he’s known for, and it ends up being an influence.
Was church choir an influence? You grew up singing in the church, and obviously, religion is very important to Ed Gein’s mother.
It was my first intro to being involved in performing music, reading music. I was six. My parents took me and put me in the church choir. There were hymns that we sang and some other classical pieces, so it’s certainly part of my DNA — this vaguely classical musical theory. I studied a little bit as I got older. I’m not fully classically trained, but yes, those early experiences in the choir are certainly part of what I do.
Do you think it had an impact on your horror scores? Obviously, lots of beautiful hymns, but church music is sometimes haunting, too.
It’s true. No, for sure. I think that the vocabulary of music for horror borrows a lot from that. There have been a lot of scores where there are these classical choral arrangements that are haunting, that really evoke scary moods. There’s definitely overlap there.
You’ve had great chapters in your career. You left NYU to work with New Order, doing producing and mixing. How’d those early days of mixing albums and thinking about audiences influence how you score?
At that time, I certainly wasn’t thinking about writing for film and television yet, but I was involved a lot in dance music. I worked with a number of DJs. We did dance remixes, wrote and produced songs. Music always connects with people in certain ways, but with dance music, you get this very immediate feedback where you can take something you’re working on that’s maybe almost finished and go and play it in a club and see how a dance floor reacts.
You can immediately see if it’s working, because playing it in the studio — yes, you can get an idea — but playing it in the club is a whole other experience with the big sound system. It was exciting back in those days to be able to work on something and then go hear it that weekend in a club and see how it was translating, how it was affecting people.
Every composer has their own journey, of course, but you have to have a variety of work experience before going into film and TV. How’d all those skills lead you to becoming the guy who composes The Ed Gein Story?
All that producing and dance remixing that I did in New York — I took those skills and I started applying them in film and television. But as far as the kind of music I’m making, it’s hard to say. I mean, I really didn’t spend much time as a serial killer when I was younger, and now I’m writing music for them. It’s a question I don’t know that I have the answer to, because I tend to work on a lot of projects that are dark. My life hasn’t been dark, but somehow those projects resonate with me, and I’m able to bring out the emotion that the storytellers want.
