Amid the large ensemble of Hell Motel, the music has been an equally important player. Slasher: Ripper marked the first season that series creators Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin turned to composer Spencer Creaghan, and they were so blown away but his work that they brought him back for Hell Motel. SurrealEstate fans who hang on every note and follow Creaghan’s behind-the-scenes IG teasers for that series exhibit no surprise there.
When I chatted with Carpenter and Martin about the season, our wide-ranging conversation included talking about the importance of Creaghan’s score, and here, Carpenter dives into how they worked together to craft its signature sound. “Oh my God, he’s such a monster talent and adds so much to it. I wish we could release an album or something, especially this season,” shares Carpenter. “The stuff that leans electronically is so my taste.”
“With all love to the people who composed music before, and I did really love working with them, last season was the first time I saw fans talking about the music.”
Carpenter explains that coming up with the nuances begins with conversations with director Adam MacDonald. “The typical route is Adam and I have a serious talk. Well, Aaron and I have a talk at the beginning about, ‘What is our reference film going to be?’ We like the look, we like the directorial style, the cutting, and the palette, and we like the music, and so we’ll share that with the team. And almost always, it’s not horror and sometimes it’s quite obscure,” he says.
View this post on Instagram
“And so we go from there. Then Adam and I tackle the music and knowing we were gonna go electronic, we parade the whole pile of directions for that. I’ll say some things ahead of it. And we use that reference film. For instance on this, there were some things that were John Carpenter-ish and some of Adam’s initial riffs. And I said, ‘Let’s just not touch it.’ Because I felt like it had been done to death the last couple years. And especially with Stranger Things and all that, we were leaning into other vibes.”
The series is block shot on a fairly tight timeline, so composing the score and relaying temp tracks for post-production happens fast. “We tell Spencer ahead of time, he starts riffing. If he can, he is doing his damnedest to get stuff done so that he can send us temps for our edits so that the editors also have it in the bin. But that’s hoping for something that often the schedule won’t allow,” explains Carpenter.
“Spencer will take a look at the temps and do his own thing. And sometimes you can end up in setups where you just keep saying to the composer, ‘More like the temp’ or ‘Like the temp.’ We are not doing that with Spencer.”
“We’ll tell him, ‘Here’s what we love about this. And I don’t have the dialogue that he obviously has as a composer for music, but, whatever it is, the tone, the temp, the feel, all that kind of stuff, the pace of the thing. And then he’ll start going and he’ll send me stuff early, where he gets very focused on characters.”
Carpenter adds that he’ll sometimes have Creaghan shift direction or tone if he’s too close to having the music be a tell about a character. “He wants to go through it and often does not know who’s who. So, sometimes he might do something a little moody and because I know that it’s the killer, I’ll say, ‘No, no, no, you can never [put this kind of stuff] around this person ever,’ and I’m tipping it off for him,” he laughs. “So it goes like that. And Adam and I are giving him feedback on that and he’ll just typically send me tweaks and tweaks and tweaks. ”
“But he’s so gifted that there are very little changes. And I think it has such a big impact.”
The season finale of Hell Motel airs Tuesday at 9 pm ET on Hollywood Suite in Canada and will be available to stream on Hollywood Suite On Demand, where you can also find the first seven episodes. In the US, the season finale will drop Tuesday on Shudder and AMC+.
As a reminder, you can catch Slasher: Ripper and Slasher: Flesh and Blood on Hollywood Suite and Shudder. The first three seasons of Slasher are still on Netflix. And all our coverage of previous seasons is here. Check back this week for our season finale conversations with Brancati, Martin, and Carpenter.
