Today, the name Zach Cregger is synonymous with horror filmmaking. The writer-director has become one of the real breakout voices within the genre over the course of the past several years, with films like Barbarian, Weapons, and Resident Evil. However, as anyone with a passing familiarity with his digital footprint prior to 2022 may know, Cregger is nothing if not a vast and varying artistic chameleon. Prior to becoming renowned as a horror auteur, Cregger was actually involved in a number of very different artistic pursuits, including the popular comedy series The Whitest Kids U' Know and the band Sirhan Sirhan.
Cregger served as the lead singer of the latter; a rock band in which his bandmates were none other than his modern-day film composers, Ryan and Hays Holladay. The duo have now composed the scores for all of Cregger’s horror features, including his most recent, Resident Evil. For the new film, the Holladays take many interesting artistic swing, channeling influences such as John Carpenter and beyond. But one of the most fascinating moments in the whole film is where they use a piano-driven motif plucked straight from Stanley Kubrick’s immortal final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The vast majority of the score for Resident Evil has more in common with Escape From New York than it does with the more classical leanings of Eyes Wide Shut. Cregger has spoken about wanting a sound that was “propulsive” and “synth-leading,” and that’s precisely what his former bandmates provided in equal measure. On a general level, this stands in pretty stark contrast to Kubrick’s use of music in Eyes Wide Shut, which blends original compositions and reinterpretations by composer Jocelyn Pook with needle-drops of classical arrangements. This was very much in keeping with Kubrick’s artistic ethos when it came to finding synchronous musical choices for his films; an approach he had pioneered on 2001: A Space Odyssey decades earlier and employed on most of his films since.
The most singularly haunting marriage of music and cinematic movement in Eyes Wide Shut though has to be the use György Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, II, a strikingly discordant arrangement that is heavy on high-end, heavy-impact piano keys. In one infamous moment, when Tom Cruise’s character is paranoid about a man who seems to be following him on the street, a particular part from this composition is utilized in which a single high-end note is struck at an increasingly rapid pace. It is hair-raising and spine-tingling in deeply invasive ways, which is why it caught my ear when Resident Evil utilized this exact same motif in a key scene.
In Cregger’s film, the motif is utilized when Austin Abrams’ character has been forced to board a parked RV and make his way through it in the dark to pass through a clogged tunnel. Here, he hears the sounds of someone in the bathroom, and the motif plays just before he opens the door to reveal an innocent little girl. Only the little girl isn’t quite as safe as she is innocent, as it is soon revealed she is infected, with her foot having already turned to tentacles wrapped around the toilet. It’s an insanely effective moment for the Holladays to utilize this musical motif, as it raises the tension in a very primal way while also drawing a unique and insightful parallel between the two films.
Eyes Wide Shut is about a man whose entire perception of his marital relationship is shattered early on, and he spends the rest of the film grasping at straws, trying and failing to make sense of this new world his wife’s point-of-view has introduced him to. Resident Evil is about a man who has just found out that his significant other is pregnant, and his subsequent trials and tribulations in fighting his way through Raccoon City can be read (if you are so inclined) as him grappling with his own altering reality, and the moment with the little girl on the RV is at the precise epicenter of all of this.
Just a further illustration of the kind of motivation, intent, and articulation that goes into the crafting of every single element of a Zach Cregger joint, right down to the most minute of musical beats.
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