VIFF 2022: Composer Michael Abels, horror maestro of Get Out, Us, and Nope, reveals the genre smarts behind his scary music
Appearing at VIFF with the VSO, the artist will talk about the diverse training that brought him to the films of Jordan Peele—as well as orchestral and operatic stages
Digging into his own biracial identity, celebrated composer Michael Abels took West African drumming classes and joined a gospel choir.
VIFF presents An Evening With Michael Abels with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Vancouver Playhouse on October 6 at 7 pm
THE MUSIC FOR THE opening credits of Get Out was an instant tipoff that audiences were in for a terrifying ride.
Stabbing strings gave way to a pulsing score of dissonant Swahili chorales intercut with ominous whispering. The composer, Michael Abels, imagined it as a warning from the main character’s Black ancestors, ghosts of the slaves, imploring him with “brother, run!” and “save yourself” in Swahili.
“[Director] Jordan Peele loves dissonant scary music,” Abels tells Stir in a phone interview before appearing here in a VIFF talk with the VSO. “He’s seen every horror movie ever made! He’s a student of it—just like I like to take genre apart, he likes to take horror movies apart. He wanted edgy music and he wanted people to be legitimately scared.”
That score for the breakout horror film with biting racial themes marked Abels’s big-screen debut as a composer. It’s since led to two more, very different collaborations with Peele: Us, rooted in everything from choral chants to hip-hop, and this year’s Nope, playing with spaghetti-western and sci-fi tropes. Abels is also in demand at symphonies and opera houses; his major new opera Omar, about a Senegalese Muslim scholar kidnapped into slavery in the early-19th century, opens at L.A. Opera later this month. (He wrote the dual role of two slaveowners specifically for Vancouver baritone Daniel Okulitch.)
But it’s still Get Out’s main title track that’s such a perfect introduction to what makes Abels such an exciting film composer—one who weaves together all the disparate strands of his upbringing and training. Part of that dates back to his early talent as a child and his search for his Black identity as a mixed-race kid raised by the white side of his family.
Abels grew up on his grandparents’ farm in South Dakota, finding his way to their family piano as a preschooler. They encouraged him to take lessons; by eight he was composing and by 13, an orchestra had performed one of his scores.
The composer recalls always being interested in an array of musical genres: “I was fascinated with jazz and blues, but I was also trying to write rock music and disco.”
It was early in adulthood that Abels was driven to connect with the Black side of his culture, joining a gospel church choir when he moved to L.A. “I was raised by my white side and I felt very comfortable being the darkest face in the room, but, essentially, I didn’t really have the experience around being Black,” he explains. “Part of that was being part of a Black community. Music is the universal language, and you lets you communicate with people you have not yet met.”
Seeking a similar connection with his roots, when he was studying music at the University of Southern California and CalArts, Abels started taking classes in West African drumming—an influence that reverberates in many of his compositions today.
“In music I learned so much about it by doing,” he stresses.
Abels was teaching music and building a reputation as a composer when he received a phone call from the producer of Get Out. Peele had been seeking an African-American composer, and when he saw a YouTube video of an orchestra playing Abels’s “Urban Legends”, it had the right mix of creepiness, interwoven with jazz and blues, that the director was looking for.
At first, the composer thought the call was a joke. But as a movie fan and L.A. resident, he knew the production company—Blumhouse—made “interesting choices”. When they sent him the eventual-Oscar-winning screenplay for Get Out, he immediately saw the sonic potential.
“It was really unlike anything I had ever seen before,” the affable artist relates. “And then I met Jordan, and he’s just as funny as he appears!”
The pair have turned out to speak the same genre-mixing language; Steven Spielberg reportedly advised Peele after seeing Get Out that Abels was his John Williams.
Scary, it seems, comes easily to Abels. “Funny is harder,” he reveals, “but what comedy and horror have in common is the important element of timing.
“So no, I don’t find scary difficult, but how much horror should there be? Is the scene just disquieting or anxiety-producing or threatening?” he continues. “We talk a great deal about the threat level at any given moment, so that part is tricky. There’s a refinement knob.”
That ability to modulate tone with such nuance—not to mention build sheer, slow-burn dread in an audience—is Abels’s specialty. So is his singular use of voices in his scores, whether they’re using real words in films like Get Out, or emitting the otherworldly vocalizations of Nope.
“It is the original instrument,” Abels says of the human voice, “and we respond to voice as soon as we hear a baby cry.”
Visitors to Abels’s talk at VIFF will be privy to many more of his tools and ideas when he conjures a score. He describes the evening as “an interesting hybrid form of a show” that’s one part concert, with the VSO playing his music, one part movie clips, and one part film-festival conversation. And, of course, as affable as the host is, audiences can expect it to be one big part creepiness, too.
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