‘Wake Up Dead Man’: Listen to a Track from Nathan Johnson’s Haunting Film Score | Exclusive

“Wake Up Dead Man” is here.

The third film in Rian Johnson’s whodunnit series, which began with 2019’s “Knives Out” and continued with 2022’s “Glass Onion,” is in theaters now and arrives on Netflix on Dec. 12. And the score, by Nathan Johnson, arrives on streaming platforms tomorrow. And we have an exclusive track from the album (“Requiem”), which you can listen to below. And stick around for our interview with Johnson.

“Wake Up Dead Man” is a far spookier affair, compared to the coziness of “Knives Out” and the vacation opulence of “Glass Onion,” with detective Benoit Blanc (a returning Daniel Craig) sent to New England to investigate the locked door mystery of a monsignor’s puzzling death. While there he teams up with a young priest (Josh O’Connor) and interrogates members of the monsignor’s church – among them Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Cailee Spaeny and Andrew Scott.

“One of the things that I love the most about these is Rian has no interest in repeating himself. Each one starts with Rian and me getting together and talking about, what is this going to feel like?” Johnson said. With “Knives Out,” they went with a “cutting string quartet in a claustrophobic New England Mansion;” for “Glass Onion” the edict was “let’s go big, broad, orchestral ‘70s vibes as we went to Greece.”

With “Wake Up Dead Man,” the intent was to go darker.

“The whole idea for this was to use the orchestra, but to flip the whole thing on its head, upend it. For most of the time, it’s using a lot of the instruments in weird, alternate ways. The very first thing you hear in the score is the sound of all the violinists scraping their bows against the strings. It’s like this nails-on-a-chalkboard sound. And then it resolves into a pure tone. It’s a tug of war between ugliness and beauty, essentially,” Johnson said.

In order to create the spooky atmosphere, Johnson said, “We took melody and threw that all out of the widow. The whole scope of the movie does follow that first idea of ugliness into beauty. By the end of the movie, which is where ‘Requiem’ happens, it’s this very pure, almost reverent moment.”

On “Requiem,” Johnson is using “a traditional orchestra.” “Everything’s played traditionally. It’s very restrained,” Johnson said. “But all of the way through the score up to this, we’ve been playing broken instruments. We’ve been playing things very much the wrong way.” Johnson said that he found an old stone church in London, where he brought in bass clarinets and “turned them into a rhythm machine where the key clocks on the instrument provided this cross between skittering spiders and falling dominoes.” He also used a broken harmonium (“When you play it, it lets out these wheezing gasps”); when he slowed it down it sounded like “an old creaky ship, like ropes pulling across timbers.”

“Requiem” was recorded with a full orchestra at Abbey Road in London. And the cue still holds a special place in Johnson’s heart.

“This was the moment for me when, when Rian first showed me his rough cut, we get to this moment in the movie and this is the first time one of Rian’s movies has made me cry,” Johnson said. “The thing that I love about this movie is while it is a Benoit Blanc movie, and it’s fun and it’s scary, there’s a real heart to it. There’s also this generosity there that really choked me up at this moment in the movie. I went home that day and it was almost like I knew very clearly this is the moment that I have to protect. If this moment doesn’t work, the whole movie doesn’t work. And so this was the first thing that I started working on to picture.”

“Wake Up Dead Man” is in theaters now and on Netflix Dec. 12. The soundtrack is available on Dec. 5.

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