How ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ Composer Used a Broken Harmonium to Create a Feeling of Dread

Writer and director Rian Johnson gave composer Nathan Johnson a direction for scoring the latest “Knives Out” film: “We’re going gothic. We’re going darker. It’s more Edgar Allan Poe.”

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns in “Wake Up Dead Man” to solve the murder of Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Josh O’Connor plays the small town priest Jud Duplenticy, but is also among the group of suspects that includes: devout churchgoer Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) and author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott).

The film will have a limited release in theaters on Nov. 26 as part of a two-week theatrical run before arriving on Netflix on Dec. 12.

While Nathan Johnson has scored the previous films (“Knives Out” and “Glass Onion”), he approached each one differently and applied the same idea to “Wake Up Dead Man” so it would be new.

“There’s an underlying dread,” Johnson says of the film. To reflect that in the score, he kicks off with the string section “scraping their bows across the strings to create this nails on a chalkboard sound.”

As the story of the congregation unfolds, Johnson chose not to give each character a notable motif. He chose to apply conceptual motifs instead.

“That scratch tone into pure tone, that’s like the motif of the jewel of Eve’s apple that they’re tracing through the whole movie,” he says. “For Martha, it’s less a melodic motif and more the idea that this is a single violin.”

With “The Confession” cue, Johnson wrote it as a violin concerto. “It’s a delicate single voice, but it can move between this great drama or this intimate quietness. At the same time, it’s strong enough to convince an entire congregation to follow it.”

Johnson recorded the score at London’s Abbey Road, but before that, he found an old stone cathedral in London to do “textural recordings with a quartet.” Johnson explains, “I got six bass clarinets and had them play with the key clicks on their instrument, and this became one of the main rhythmic things that we hear.”

He also found a half broken harmonium. Johnson says, “It’s creaking and wheezing, so I recorded that and slowed it down.” It plays under Brolin’s character. “Rian was talking about with Wick’s character and the idea that he’s like Moby Dick. He’s like Captain Ahab, ranting at the waves and there’s this leviathan lurking under the surface. When I recorded this, it feels like the wood is creaking and ropes are pulling across old timbers. It’s not something that you would pick out, but you feel this creaky dread that something is coming.”

Listen to “The Confession” below.