Score one for Red State

Last Sunday night, my lovely girlfriend Chelsea and I attended a screening of Kevin Smith's new flick, Red State.  After the screening, he spoke for about an hour about various aspects of making the horror movie, a departure from his normal comedy adventures.  Using no traditional act structure and skewering story tropes, Kevin calls this an experimental film, explaining, “Everything is designed to keep you off balance.  All the things that allow an audience member to sit there and be ahead of the movie, we just throw out.”

One thing Smith mentioned was the importance of score, or in the case, the lack thereof.  "I put some score into the scenes and I was like, 'this feels like fucking bullshit, like this just dropped and it just became a fuckin’ movie.'  Take the score out and like, 'shit this is real.'  it forces the audience to decide how they feel at any given moment.  I’m not telegraphing or telling you how to feel via the music.  I let you decide how to feel, and that’s difficult in this movie from time to time.”

In reality television, it's often necessary to tell the audience how to feel via music to quickly tell complex stories or add meaning to footage that was maybe a little soft to begin with.  On most shows we have wall-to-wall music, meaning there is almost never any significant time without music of some kind playing.  Usually a cue will last 30 seconds to a minute, so a one-hour show (about 43 minutes without commercials) will have around 75 music cues in it.

That being said, it can be very powerful to remove score at key moments to draw attention to drama.  If you're having a tough time deciding which cue to use during a sad, tense or even joyful moment, consider dropping out the score as your solution.  If you've properly set up the stakes and emotion in previous scenes, trust your audience to react accordingly.