Michael Daniel is a composer who recently won an award for his score for the feature film, Blood Rush. Here he answers 13 questions for us on his experience in music and horror!
The first horror movie I ever saw was Jaws. I was in the third or fourth grade and it remains, to this day, one of my favorite movies, horror or otherwise, of all time - and one of the best film scores to boot.
2. What can you tell us about your musical upbringing?
My mother was a piano teacher, so music was an inevitability in my household. I was playing the piano as far back as I can remember. Mom didn’t teach me herself, but she had one of her other piano teacher friends take me under her wing, starting around the age of five or six. I continued to take piano lessons until I was fifteen, at which point my parents let me trade out piano lessons for music composition lessons. I started writing musicals pretty much instantly. I started writing my first rock opera, an adaptation of Frankenstein, around sixteen.
3. How did you come up with the idea of doing a musical about Victor Frankenstein and his monster?
This one started in high school when I just started composing music. I wanted to write a musical ever since I saw a Phantom of the Opera and my passion was re-ignited when I saw a local state college production of Sweeney Todd. This inspired me to do something horror-themed and I considered stories like Jekyll and Hyde or The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Dracula was a close second, but I finally chose Frankenstein because I always preferred science-fiction horror.
4. Your other genre musical is Sleepy Hollow which was done a few years later. What did you learn in the time that passed?
Frankenstein took me two years to write because when I started writing I had no idea how to go about formatting the score for a musical. This was mainly because I always had to go back and redo things I've already done - now I knew better. My compositional style also changed greatly, Sleepy Hollow is a lot more experimental - I discarded all the harmonic rules and played with the notes until I got something nice in the end.
5. Were these musicals ever produced / recorded. If yes, how can we hear them?
So far the only musicals of mine that have been produced are three of my comedies, The Show Must Go On, Alone and Miserable Lesbians (a parody of Les Miserables). I recorded Frankenstein as a demo with me singing all the parts (badly) - some of it is available on my homepage, but it's not something I would make readily available. If I ever had all the time and money necessary, I'd love to have good quality recordings of both Frankenstein and Sleepy Hollow.
6. Let's talk about your new score, Blood Rush, a cool zombie flick whose soundtrack was issued by MovieScore Media. What's your favorite zombie film/story?
I will probably outrage the readers by admitting this, but my favorite zombie flicks are the more comedic ones: Shaun of the Dead, Fido, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and so on. I enjoy the “serious” zombie horror films, too, but personally I’ve always kinda found zombies more comedic than scary, so I really enjoy it when other people show that I’m not alone in that. That’s one reason why I enjoyed working on Blood Rush.
7. How does Blood Rush compare with/differ from other zombie films from the last few years?
One thing I really liked about the concept of Blood Rush (and in the recent trend of zombie flicks) is that the zombies can actually MOVE. They aren’t those drooling, sluggish zombies that we usually think about when we hear the term movie zombie - these zombies can run, they can think and they can tear your head off!
8. How did you get involved with scoring Blood Rush?
I met filmmaker Kerry Marlowe(at the time, Kerry Finlayson) at the Toscars, a fun short film competition that poked fun at each year’s nominees with brief parody videos. We kept in touch and a few months later I saw Kerry posting that she was looking for actors for a new zombie film. I replied that she probably didn’t want me acting, but that if they needed some music, they could give me a call. Few more months down the road, she and Evan sent me a clip of the scene with the cat (no spoilers!), they had me write a mock-up for that and this got me the gig!
9. How did working on this film differ from your previous experiences?
I only had one more “professional” experience before to Blood Rush and that project was somewhat frustrating. The director was like all the student directors I had know - he didn’t know what he wanted, but he didn’t want to admit that. We had a lot of discussions, but then ended up with a two hour film with less than 20 minutes of music! Kerry and Evan are the exact opposite of this; they understand the importance of music and that it intensifies the experience and doesn't detract from it. Evan gave me interesting guidelines like like, “I want this to sound like frogs jumping in a frying pan” or something like “the sound of a dolphin being strangled to death.” Perhaps this explains a lot about the score.
10. What’s your favorite sequence from the film?
It's very hard to pick only one, but here it goes. There's a scene where an old, injured guy is lying on the ground, doing this five minute rant about he was separated from his son on his birthday and so on. While he's going on and on, there's this zombie just standing there, looking hungrily at him and our hero Danny is just shaking his head, not wanting to interrupt the guy, but he also realizes that if the he doesn’t shut up, they’d get eaten. That was great scene to score!
11. You've recently completed Horror House for the same team of filmmakers. What can you tell us about that score?
Horror House was a real blast to work on. Perhaps the most challenging thing about it is the fact that it's an anthology picture, so Evan wanted me to come up with a completely different instrumental palette for each piece. One dominant instrument from one scene couldn't appear in the others - but I enjoy a challenge!
12. What is your most recent score?
In terms of film scoring, my most recent work is a new horror/soap opera web series called Bennington Gothique. You can see the first three episodes online at www.benningtongothique.com. My score has been nominated for best original score in the 5th Annual Indie Series Awards.
13. Are you planning on doing more horror themed musicals?
Yes, I've just started working on a new musical called Dark Lord: The Musical. My co-writers and I are still only in the draft stages right now, we aren’t putting out too much information plot-wise, but I would describe this musical as if the Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog was about a fantasy super villain (think Sauron or Voldemort) instead of a comic book super villain. The website should be up later this year, but you can already follow us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/darklordthemusical
The score to Blood Rush is available now from Screamworks records:
