Look. Listen. Shudder!

Musicians relish chance to score flicks that scare

By Renee Graham, Globe Staff | October 28, 2005

· Silent films were never really silent.

True, there was no spoken dialogue, but the film's images were always augmented with music as a means of moving the story along, and manipulating its emotional impact.

That remains the goal of modern musicians resurrecting the notion of playing live music as an accompaniment to vintage and silent films. For Halloween, the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline will present two classic horror films, James Whale's ''Frankenstein" and F.W. Murnau's ''Nosferatu," with live soundtracks performed by Michael Shapiro and Boston's Devil Music Ensemble, respectively.

''One of the fascinating things for me is that the modern instruments we use, such as electric guitars, allow the film to be timeless," says Brendon Wood, who plays guitar as well as synthesizer, accordion, and banjo for Devil Music Ensemble. ''Suddenly, the film no longer exists in 1922 or whatever year it is. Piano or organ music could antiquate the film and make it more like a silent film. But the music we, or any other modern group does, makes you forget about the year the film was made."

Cambridge's Alloy Orchestra, which originally formed in 1986, became nationally recognized in the early 1990s when it composed and performed an original score for Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film classic ''Metropolis." It released its debut album, ''New Scores for Silent Films," in 1994. Alloy Orchestra will perform music for ''Phantom of the Opera" tonight at Somerville Theatre.

Also formed in Boston, Devil Music Ensemble began in 1999 as a rock band. Still, its members, which now include Jonah Rapino (violin, bass, vibraphone) and Tim Nylander (percussion), were always intrigued by experimental ways to combine music with film. For a Providence show in 2001, they composed a soundtrack for Jean Cocteau's ''Le sang d'un poete," and later that year, did the same for Charlie Chaplin's ''Modern Times."

By 2002, when Devil Music Ensemble performed music for Rene Claire's film ''Le Voyage Imaginaire (The Imaginary Voyage)," the band's attitude about its new direction had changed from a lark into ''Let's really do this," Wood says.

''It always begins with watching the film, taking notes, and finding the moments where our music can really accentuate a scene," he says. ''Then we sit down with our instruments as a group and more or less improvise. We pull out the ideas we really like, and then we work on it individually. It's a collective process."

Having done this for several years, Wood says he and his band mates are starting to ''understand the challenges" in composing film scores. ''I don't feel like we can play any old piece of music that sounds cool," Wood says. ''We have to pay attention to what's happening in the film in that I don't want the music to impose upon the film. I don't ever want the music to be in front of the film. They have to work in tandem."

For Shapiro, who is music director and conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra in New York, his desire to create live soundtracks grew from his love for early horror films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Unlike the silent ''Nosferatu," ''Frankenstein" is a ''talkie."

'' 'The Bride of Frankenstein' has a famous movie score by Franz Waxman, but 'Frankenstein' has no music," Shapiro says. Whale's ''Frankenstein," still considered the definitive film version of Mary Shelley's classic novel, was made in 1931, two years before Max Steiner composed the first film score, featured in the original ''King Kong."

''['Frankenstein' is] a very spooky movie without music, but I wanted to do this, and I wrote this score for a full orchestra," Shapiro says. At the Coolidge, he will perform solo with an electronic keyboard with symphonic sounds that emulate such instruments as strings and percussion.

Shapiro describes ''Frankenstein" as ''a very mysterious and elegant film," and he supplied 60 minutes of music for the 70-minute film. Still, he says, he likes to leave ''silence in there."

''You can create a wall of sound, then stop, and the audience goes 'Whoa!' " he says. ''Plus with a film like this, you can't have too much music because you'll overwhelm the voices. I thought of the film as kind of like a one-act opera, and you create an opera's sense of drama. It's about manipulating the audience through music, and it's just great. You don't give away anything too quick, so that when you do, you knock them dead."