Drum & Lace Talks Composing the Hauntingly Beautiful Score for 'Cobweb' (2023): Interview

Directed by Samuel Bodin, ‘Cobweb’ follows an eight-year-old boy named Peter who lives a seemingly normal life with his overprotective, yet oddly mannered parents. It’s Halloween night and Peter has plans to go trick-or-treating. To his surprise, his parents forbid him from doing so and tell him that years ago a young girl in their neighborhood disappeared on Halloween night. Later that evening, Peter starts to hear a mysterious tapping sound coming from his bedroom wall…

Drum & Lace, aka Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist, is an Italian composer, sound artist, and performer currently located in Los Angeles, California. Some of her previous scoring credits include the score for the Netflix film “ Night Teeth”, the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” series score for Amazon Prime Video, and the film score for Netflix’s “Deadly Illusions.” Her work also includes such mediums as dance, theater, and fashion. Macabre Daily had the pleasure of interviewing Drum & Lace earlier this week regarding her beautifully eerie score for the new horror-thriller ‘Cobweb.’

Where did you get some of your inspiration when you were doing the score for ‘Cobweb’?

“From a lot of places actually. Samuel Bodin, the director, had a very specific vision for this movie. He has kind of like a very focused approach to everything that he’s done. We had a lot of conversations early on because I was brought onto this movie before they actually shot. So I had the privilege of being able to kind of discuss the script with him and really talk about what he wanted to create visually and what he wanted to do musically.

I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to watch the film, but there’s a very big shift that happens, so we had to sort of make sure that the music went along for the ride, but without giving anything away. It was really important that the different sort of chapters that happen kind of not shock, but definitely give a little bit of a surprise to the audience. For the beginning part of the movie, we really wanted to focus on it sounding like a dark fairytale.

We talked a lot about more traditional scores along the lines of anything from Bernard Herrmann with Hitchcock movies, down to James Newton Howard and what he did for some of the M. Night movies. Also of course the importance of John Carpenter and all sort of classic horror scores in a way. Sam also wanted to capture that kind of timelessness sort of like Spielberg movies. Strings, pianos, and bells, something kind of along those lines.”

Is there a method to how you typically compose the score for a film, specifically for the horror genre?

“I think the most important thing for me in my experience with horror so far has been to develop a palette that’s very specific to the project. I think that before I even start to score, finding sounds and kind of having a bank of things to pull from is really important because those end up becoming the things that psychologically signal that there’s something about to happen. It’s like the things that kind of work as the scare sounds in a way.

I think that in my experience, the most important thing is finding sounds that are unique to the project. It’s like strings. You can make string sounds in many different ways if you really have the chance to manipulate them ahead of time. In the case of Cobweb, I actually did like a sample.

I had two musicians record a bunch of stuff that was then heavily manipulated and chopped up. One is a saxophone that Jon Natchez performed. He’s a fellow composer and musician and so a lot of the kind of like swells that sound a little wavery is used a lot in the second half of the film, that’s the saxophone swells that have been processed. The other is my friend Ro Rowan, who is an incredible cellist who has played on most of my scores.

They recorded string effects and all these things that I then the same thing, ran through distortions and whatever, but having those two sets of sounds and knowing what Sam wanted with the bells, those things are kind of what helped me really get started.”

Were there any tracks in particular that you enjoyed creating the most?

“There’s actually a few, and this wasn’t even the full soundtrack. There were about 15 more minutes that were emitted because a lot of it was shorter stings. I feel like I really enjoyed working on the beginning theme that comes in, and on another, it’s kind of like this descending string line. It’s sort of more like an emotional cue that is meant to be Peter, the main character, feeling sort of personified. It kind of also relates to Miss Divine, who’s the substitute teacher that he’s friends with.

I really like a longer queue, which is called Into Mayhem, it’s actually the longest track on the soundtrack. I love how it allowed me to outline all of these different action moments of a sequence when guests enter the house, and “into mayhem.” It was just so much fun to do that because it was like having to hit so many things happening. Being able to have this palette and the sound would be so big and sort of creepy and industrial, so I loved working on that. There’s one more, Watching Them Die. It’s just that one that hits on the perfect amount of creepiness and all the kind of electronic elements, so I really enjoyed that one.”

What drew you to wanting to do the score for Cobweb? Did you watch it beforehand or just go off the script?

“So, I was brought the project. They went to a couple of composers, and I read the script, and I just completely fell in love with it. It was so innovative and just like what it was able to evoke in the first, sort of like ten pages, was just so powerful and eerie and creepy. I literally couldn’t put it down. I was just going and it kept getting wilder and wilder so that definitely drew me to a point where I was pitching forward and going through the demoing process of it, and it was so important to me to do a good job.

It’s funny because the demo that I did, that track and those sounds, didn’t end up essentially making it into this because I think it was more aggressive than what he (Samuel Bodin) wanted. But yeah, it was really the script and Sam’s dedication. From the first time I talked to him, it was just so obvious how big of a horror fan he is and how he was really going to try to do this movie justice.”

Do you have any future projects that you’re working on right now?

“I wrapped up a project in April that actually just came out July 22nd. It’s a completely different genre, it’s a romantic dramedy. Well, I’d say it’s a romance drama. It’s called ‘Red, White & Royal Blue.’ It’s streaming on Amazon Prime and it’s completely different. It’s like an LGBTQ romance. I finished that in April and then the writer’s strike and the actor’s strike happened, things have been kind of on hold. So I’ve actually just been focusing like the last six weeks on writing my next record, which has been really great. So I have that to look forward to.

Hopefully, once things pick back up kind of on the movie front, there will be some more things in the works. Cobweb doesn’t actually release in the UK until September 1st, so I feel like that buys me some great excitement going into the Halloween season since this movie is set on Halloween. I’m hoping since that it was so limited in theaters in the US that it’ll kind of have a second life.”

What made you want to get into composing for film and television?

“So funny enough, I feel like my artist career and the scoring stuff has kind of been at the same time. I sort of fell into film scoring when I was in college, so long ago at this point because I’d gone to music college wanting to be a performer, and then when I realized that wasn’t really going to pan out the way I wanted to, I was like well I love film and they had a film scoring major. So my desire to want to work within film and TV realistically kind of started then, and that was 2008, so it’s been a long sort of journey.

I wasn’t really into wanting to go the traditional route of moving to LA, doing the assistant thing, whatever. I feel like I took a bunch of detours, and that’s when the artist project started happening. Meanwhile, I was also scoring films and documentaries, and I feel like everything sort of outweighs each other. It’s like when one is doing well, the other one goes on pause sort of thing. But they’ve been growing together which has been really great because I feel like I get hired to score things that are ultimately informed by the music I put out and then the skills that I learned from scoring a new project that inform what I can do with it.

They feed into each other really well, the only thing is that they definitely require two parts of the brain. One is like shut-in working on films and the other is so front-facing playing shows and being part of a greater artist community. I feel like as an extrovert, I appreciate both sides because I feel like just scoring would not fulfill for me or the people. It’s like a little bit of the best of both worlds, I get to fulfill someone’s vision with the scoring stuff and help them bring something to life, but then I also kind of get to do whatever I want on my side.”

In your opinion, what is the most rewarding part of composing a score for a film?

“I think just seeing people enjoy it when it comes out. It just makes me so happy when anyone takes away something good from it. We’re all essentially making movies and making stuff to make people think or to take people away from whatever they’re thinking about. It’s supposed to be an experience. Even when I see somebody hating it, I see somebody taking the time to watch something, whether they love it or hate it. With Cobweb, it’s been very much that way.

It’s funny, I feel like more high-brow critics who aren’t necessarily horror fans like the first half but don’t like the second, but then horror fans find the first half a little slow, and love the second half. It’s been really fun to see and I mean I also just love the relationships and sort of mood of bringing it all together. When you’re in the thick of something, there’s nothing like it when you’re working with a team and things are working out well.”

You can still watch ‘Cobweb’ in select theaters and it is also available for purchase on streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu, and YouTube. We had a wonderful time chatting with Drum & Lace and you can keep up with her future projects at http://www.drumandlacemusic.com/

Stay up to date with “The Dark Side Of Pop Culture” by following MacabreDaily on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.