Chris Spencer on Scoring a Horror Movie and Getting People to Watch the Dawn of the Dead Remake

Chris Spencer has always been a fan of blood, knives and half-dispoed-of remains of dead bodies. The album artwork for his now-on-hiatus band Unsane was always some kind of re-imagined urban murder scene. Sometimes they were a made-up display, while others -- like the classic 'Scattered, Smothered & Covered' artwork, based on photos from Mexican death magazines -- recreated real-life scenes. So it's no surprise that Spencer, alongside his Celan bandmate Ari Benjamin Meyers, is composing a score to the French gore film 'La Mute.'

The chance to work on the musical side of a horror movie came from the director telling Spencer that Unsane was the perfect soundtrack. "The director is a big Unsane fan," Chris Spencer told Noisecreep. "And apparently he was listening to the track 'East Broadway' off 'Visqueen' -- which has no vocals and is kind of industrial -- while he was writing the screenplay.

For Spencer, this is a longtime dream come true, as his love of horror has been covers all forms of the creation process. "Before playing in Unsane, me and [bassist Pete Shore], were driving cabs and making lungs and heads and all kind of stuff at his apartment and trying to do some prosthetic effects," Spencer beamed. "It's fun stuff."

When Spencer was asked about his favorite horror films and directors, he rifled off the expected kings of the genre like Herschell Gordon Lewis, Peter Jackson and George Romero. But he also admitted to a fondness for the 2004 remake of Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead,' which is rarely admitted, since many people stay away from remakes of the classics.

But Spencer has a foolproof way to get people past that stigma. "What I do is show people that first sequence before the titles come up," Spencer admitted, setting the scene. "You know, where she goes to the hospital and comes home and that girl jumps up and attacks her husband, and they have that huge long shot where Milwaukee has broken into chaos. I just show them that first scene, and I say, 'Now you can watch the rest of the movie if you want to,'" Spencer laughed. "And inevitably, everyone I have done that to wants to watch the rest."

Of course the film is far from perfect in Spencer's eyes. "The only thing I don't like are some of the MTV-esque montages with the songs."