‘Morbius’ Composer Jon Ekstrand on How John Carpenter Inspired the Music of Jared Leto’s Marvel Movie
This piece was originally posted on FilmSpeak.
Morbius is the latest addition to Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, made in conjunction with the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Unlike its predecessors, there’s a darkness and an ambiguity to the main character of Morbius (Jared Leto). He straddles the line of hero and villain, keeping the audience guessing throughout the entire film.
Composer Jon Ekstrand, in his seventh partnership with director Daniel Espinosa, plays a large part in creating this uncertain world. The two have known each other and worked together for twenty-five years, so they were immediately able to get on the same page about the way they wanted Morbius to sound. “We’re the same age…we have a lot of the same references,” Ekstrand says. The pair decided early on that they wanted a synth-heavy score. “That was the initial thought we had…to make him scary. To make the music sound like we are actually doubting if this is a good guy.” Ekstrand was excited by the challenge of blending multiple genres and musical references together.
Those references are varied homages to what Ekstrand was listening to in his teenage years. Throughout the score, there are distorted bass drums that sound like they were lifted directly from the early-’90s grunge scene. “It has this industrial music feel to it,” he says. And yet, there are moments when the score harkens back to John Carpenter’s Halloween, a pulse-pounding synth that overwhelms the senses. Ekstrand was wearing an Escape from New York t-shirt as we talked, and there’s no question that he has great reverence for Carpenter’s work. With inspiration also drawn from the electronic bands he enjoyed as a teen, like The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers, the score feels personal in a way that’s unexpected in a superhero film.
Morbius’ moral ambiguity comes across in Ekstrand’s decision to blend Carpenter-esque synths with sweeping orchestral arrangement. “You really need the orchestra for the epic feel, to really backbone all of the electronics,” Ekstrand says. He wanted there to be moments in the score where audiences weren’t sure if they were hearing electronic sounds or violins acting as synths. There are many layered sounds that add to the overall sense of unease and untrustworthiness of the character — car alarms (which Ekstrand referred to as a “monster scream”), angelic choirs, and fluttering bat wings all contribute to Morbius’s duality.
Morbius is also known as The Living Vampire, and Ekstrand was interested in writing a score that referenced bats and vampires. He loved Wojciech Kilar’s music for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and already knew quite a bit about vampire lore. Where Ekstrand lacked knowledge was about bats themselves, so he spent time learning about how they create sound and communicate with one another. He worked long hours with the orchestra to get their instruments to sound like bats and then wove that cohesively into his score.
Given its role in the Marvel and Sony universes, Ekstrand, at times worried that this score was too different from earlier films in the superhero canon. “As a composer, you work a lot alone, so you have your days of doubts and so on, and of course you’re doubting yourself, like are we going in the completely wrong direction not doing what everyone else is doing…classical film score lovers are going to hate me for this score.”
As for what fans can expect from the score as a whole, Ekstrand says he’s proud of the direction Morbius ended up taking. “I’m excited to show the world that we did something else, that we didn’t do the classic, heroic, superhero score.”
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