It’s hard to predict what kind of music will accompany each new folk/period horror film (recent examples including MMMD’s glacial ritual drone score for Hagazussa and Mark Korven’s piercingly chaotic work on The Witch). The most unexpected of these is certainly Rob Coudert’s (aka Rob) synth work on Gretel & Hansel.
The film is, not surprisingly, a re-telling of the classic German fairytale Hansel and Gretel. Except this version features, among other things, grotesque witchcraft, ample psychedelia, and endless stylistic indulgence. More than anything else, it’s the style that sets Gretel & Hansel apart from other modern folk horror films. It’s colorful and striking, drawing a sharp contrast with the medieval famine and strife that serves as a backdrop.
From the first notes, Rob lets us know not to expect a typical dark fairytale, with music more appropriate in a John Carpenter film or NewRetroWave compilation. It’s a dirty, dreamy, surreal synth that should have no place in a fairytale. Yet, this utterly anachronistic style fits right in. This is partly due to the occasional use of string and woodwind electronics and samples, which help ground the music in this period setting. But mostly the music works because the film itself is so odd. Gretel & Hansel is first and foremost a stylish, revisionist fairytale that frequently veers into bouts of psychedelia. It’s downright weird, and deserves a similarly weird musical accompaniment.
The musical highpoint is when Rob matches his score to the hallucinatory fervors in which Gretel and Hansel frequently find themselves. In these moments the film fully embraces a sensory overload, and the score joins the ranks of Jim Williams’ A Field in England and Clint Mansell’s In the Earth as one of the best experimental music/image pairings in recent years. The synths take on a mind of their own, the screen twists and morphs into a fantastical delusion, and we fall ever briefly into the rabbit hole.
But there’s also an emptiness to the film’s flashiness, a looming dread behind this alluring illusion. As it eventually inhibits the characters from enjoying the unending delights the witch treats them to, so too does it eventually inhibit the listener/viewer from relishing in the music. Rob isn’t simply making the score sound cool for the sake of it. He does it so we let our guard down, embrace it, and only then find ourselves similarly deceived. Once we reach later tracks like “Raconteur,” with its gnawing drone, it’s too late: we’ve fallen prey to the witch’s clutches, victims of her great ploy enshrouded in beguiling synth modernity.
I’ve championed Rob’s music for a while now, and really hoped that Gretel & Hansel would be a success and make him a bit more well known outside of his native France. I don’t think it has, which is a shame given just how good his score is.