After Leaving Nine Inch Nails, Charlie Clouser Broke John Williams’ Record With the Saw Movies

Liz Shannon Miller
·8 min read
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The post After Leaving Nine Inch Nails, Charlie Clouser Broke John Williams’ Record With the Saw Movies appeared first on Consequence.

Charlie Clouser knows that the Saw movies aren’t for everybody. “It has its dedicated little weirdo fanbase that is rabid about it, but it’s very much a niche within a niche, and it’s become even more so as the franchise evolved.”

It’s an evolution he’s gotten to observe intimately, as the composer who’s worked on every film since the original Saw, released 19 years ago this October. And with Saw X, Clouser breaks a big record, as he’s now the first American to score 10 films within the same franchise — beating John Williams’ iconic run on nine Star Wars films. “Obviously, I certainly wouldn’t put myself on John Williams’s level in any department other than the sheer number of sequels within a single franchise,” he says. “But I think I’ve always kept a running tally — each time a new Star Wars film would come out, I would think, ‘Okay, let’s see, am I catching up to him yet?'”

If you’ve ever heard Clouser’s industrial compositions for the Saw films, then it won’t come as a surprise that he was a part of the band Nine Inch Nails from 1994 to 2001. However, Clouser actually began his career as a composer prior to getting involved with the band — his first job making music for money was working on the 1980s series The Equalizer.

“Stuart Copeland, the drummer from The Police, had scored the first few seasons and done the theme, and then he left to do whatever, and another composer was brought in, an Australian record producer,” Clouser says. “I was working with him doing the sound design and all the rhythm programming. Not the thematic composition, but all the high tech studio wizard type stuff around the central themes.”

He exited that gig, he says, for “a 15-year detour into making records.” Then, in 2001, he left NIN to focus on composition. “I already had some experience and knowledge of, you know, how the sausage gets made — I had been under the gun on a weekly TV series deadline,” he says. “So from a compositional standpoint, at least I wasn’t strictly a refugee from bands. I wasn’t trying to figure out how to do reverse chorus guitar solo kinds of arrangements.”

It also helped that Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor “was a little bit unconventional” — specifically in regard to how Reznor arranged and organized pieces of music. “It wasn’t the standard verse, chorus, guitar, solo, chorus, kind of rock songwriting,” he says. “And of course Nine Inch Nails is also very heavily dependent on musical sound design, and unusual sounds used in a musical context.”

Continues Clouser, “that’s what attracted me to working with the band, and that’s the same kind of thing that attracts me to the type of scoring projects that I do, where I’m not just using strings and clarinets and so on. I can pull from the entire spectrum of unusual sounds as long as they fit the emotional context of what’s happening.”

How many afternoons has Clouser spent in junkyards, hitting various pieces of metal with sticks to hear what they sound like? “A lot,” he says with a laugh. “I love odd devices that make sound, especially if they’re evocative or emotional somehow.”

In Saw X, infamous serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is seeking treatment for his cancer after the events of the first Saw, but when he discovers that an experimental medical procedure is really a scam preying on the desperate, he decides to bring his unique form of judgment to the con artists involved.

Clouser confirms that the premise affected his approach to the score, because his preference is “to keep the sonics grounded in what we’re seeing on the screen. It’s all gritty and happening in familiar places; it’s all happening in some abandoned warehouse. So that helps me delineate the categories of sounds that I want to use and to take. I always want the sounds within the score to have a similar character, so that they match the sense of place of what we’re seeing on screen.”

What we’re seeing on screen, of course, is traps — the Saw franchise’s signature element. “The very first film was more along the lines of a movie like Seven, where the actual moments of gore are fairly short and small, and it’s about the suspense of getting to that moment,” Clouser says. “Of course, Saws 2 through 10 became much more focused on the traps that the people are subjected to, which the fans love — they love dissecting the plot and the mechanisms behind these traps.”

The trap sequences, Clouser says, “have become little set pieces where the music is extremely precisely mapped out to the action and the tempo on the screen, especially in those scenes where there might be a ticking clock or some machine that is operating. There is an underlying tempo that you can find not just to the cuts in the picture, but also to the machines and the sense of time running out that’s occurring on screen.”

While the first film wasn’t as elaborate, trap-wise, it did introduce the one piece of music that has endured across all ten films — “Hello Zepp,” the theme that always plays over the montage revealing the complete puzzle.

“My analogy [for ‘Hello Zepp’] is that you’re watching across a dark parking lot at some guys beating somebody up. And then all of a sudden they turn and face you and all the lights in the parking lot come on. We wanted it to be a very severe gear shift,” he says. “It’s in a different key to anything else that’s in the movie, and it uses sounds which don’t appear anywhere else in the movie. You’ve changed the channel on the TV and you’ve jumped into a whole different sonic footprint. And that was very much on purpose.”

“Hello Zepp,” he says, is now iconic “to the point where, for the diehard fans, when they hear the little jingly dulcimer sound that begins the ‘Hello Zepp’ theme, they know it’s time to pay attention, here’s where it’s all going to pay off.”

It’s an important piece of music, he adds, because its connection to the final reveals of each film means that “there’s a lot of information flying at the audience: There’s voiceover, there’s quick cuts, flashbacks to earlier scenes in the movie. So that piece of music, it wanted to be bold and big and engaging, but it had to be bite-sized — the actual musical material within it couldn’t be distracting and so elaborate that it would draw people’s attention away from this stuff which will be on the final exam. So that was sort of a very conscious mission that I sat out on, and fortunately that piece of music has proved very sturdy, because we’ve used it in all ten of the movies so far.”

Clouser creates a new iteration of the “Hello Zepp” theme for each film, though “there are some molecules of audio that I’ve brought with me across all ten iterations that were recorded in 2003 and that have a certain sonic signature. A soundalike wouldn’t do — it has to be that original little dulcimer phrase. I have a million dulcimer sounds and half a dozen dulcimers, but that one recording of it is almost like an audio ident. I can’t change the pitch or the octave or the speed. It has to be that exact little molecule of audio.”

For the original version of “Hello Zepp,” Clouser also used modified drum machines he’s collected for years: “Hackers open [them] and solder extra switches and wires that cause the digital brain of the thing to sort of have a brain fart. They make these little… not beeps and bloops, but kind of little grainy digital noises within the percussion track.”

saw-x-tobin-bell
saw-x-tobin-bell

Saw X (Lionsgate)

The dulcimer and drum machine sounds, he says, are essential parts of the original sonic footprint, which he then combines with new elements for each Saw film. Then he has to make sure the music fits the film’s ending sequence, “while still using a few of those elements from 20 years ago, which thanks to the magic of computers, I can still use.”

Back when Clouser originally created “Hello Zepp,” there was no indication that the Saw films would keep going as long as they have. “We have thought that the Saw franchise was finished a couple of times,” he says, noting that the seventh film, 2010’s Saw 3D, was originally billed as the final installment.

“So you figure, well, ‘That’s a wrap, guys. We had a great run.’ For a while there, we were doing a Saw movie every year — if it’s Halloween, it must be Saw. And we did that for six or seven years, until I think the first Paranormal Activity movie knocked us out one Halloween weekend. And there was a bit of a break there for a few years, until they lit the fuse again with Jigsaw and then Spiral: From the Book of Saw.”

Now, he continues, “we’re back with with our favorite anti-hero Tobin Bell and his Jigsaw. So I learned long ago to never count it out, to never figure that it’s over. Will there be a Saw 11? Who knows but the producers — Oren Koules and Mark Berg. And they are more enthusiastic and hyped up about this one than I’ve seen them in a while. So I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Saw X arrives in theaters on Friday, September 29th.

After Leaving Nine Inch Nails, Charlie Clouser Broke John Williams’ Record With the Saw Movies
Liz Shannon Miller

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