A good score can turn a movie on its head, and from the first few seconds of The Invisible Man, you can immediately tell that’s what will happen. Gizmodo is excited to exclusively debut a track from Benjamin Wallfisch’s score today.
Wallfisch may not be a name you immediately recognise, but you know his work; he did the score to both It movies, Shazam, Hellboy, and Blade Runner 2049. Now his geek cred grows even further by tackling a Universal Monster.
Wallfisch’s latest work, the musical accompaniment to The Invisible Man,
is as terrifying and eerie as you’d imagine having an invisible stalker might actually be. “It was about using silence rhythmically,” he said in a press release. “When there is music, the gestures and sonic attitude are sometimes so left-field and extreme that you almost don’t trust the score’s absence when it’s not there. As a kind of analogue to the presence of [the Invisible Man] in the film.”
Here’s that exclusive track, called “Escape,” which instantly lets you in on the power and paranoia of the score.
“The orchestral instrumentation is deliberately constrained to strings,” Wallfisch said of his score. “Only so that the musicians were pushed to their max, without the support of a full orchestra. That choice was also an homage to one of my heroes, Bernard Herrmann, and one of his masterpieces, the Psycho score.”
And yet, in “Escape,” you hear something else. Something far more sinister, and it’s the theme assigned to the Invisible Man himself. “Rather than a melodic theme, we needed a signature sound for [the Invisible Man],” Wallfisch said. “Something that just creeps up on you. The sonic for the Invisible Man himself is entirely electronic, and when it goes full tilt, we tried to push things as hard as they could possibly go.”
If you want to hear more from this score, it’ll be available to stream and purchase starting February 21 via Back Lot Music, followed by an LP release through Mondo on March 4.
Or, of course, you can go see The Invisible Man. Directed by Leigh Whannell and starring Elisabeth Moss, it opens February 27.