An affluent American suburb at night: old trees, manicured gardens, maintained roads, restored street lamps. A Black man has just been thrown into a car. On cue with the trunk slam: Appalachian strings, ukulele finger-picking, and Swahili choral humming intoning “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga”. It translates as “listen to your ancestors”. The chorale’s rhythmic incantations push and pull like workers rowing ships, tilling fields, breaking rocks. A montage of black and white photos accompany the song cycle’s sombre warning. Taken by photographer Chris, their celebration of tenement living contrasts with the upscale decor of his Brooklyn conversion. The deliberate labelling of this scene reads: aspirational Black man. Let’s hope Chris hears the words of the music played.

This is how director Jordan Peele and composer Michael Abels announce their collaboration, Get Out (2017). An industry debut for each and the first of three films so far (two discussed here), its music is deeply embedded in the movie, as is the African-American experience embedded in its speculative tale. The score accordingly flits from musicalised resonances of slavery, to spiny orchestrations of horror. The film’s admonition is as much about a type of ‘post-racial’ aspiration as it is about being caught by a lodge of eugenic disruptors transplanting angry white brains into virile Black bodies. Abels’ score – often mannered and genteel – operates like a dog whistle as heard by those ancestors.

Trading on his background as a composer of symphonies and operas in a milieu far removed from Hollywood, Abels’s genre scoring is full of delicate harp plucks, tremulous strings, light double bass throbs. Rote spooky sonics that here generate irrational unease, especially when paired with the suffocating upper class domesticity of the upstate mansion of Chris’s girlfriend, Rose, where she is introducing her Black boyfriend for the first time to her privileged parents. In many passages, Abels’s tonality wanders within these confines: its focus is unclear and hard to specify. This is because he is not scoring stark racism. Instead, he is responding to the subtle racism imperceptibly woven into the Gothic atmosphere of the New England realm. The cues respond equally to hidden racial prejudice and false performative correctness.

Get Out abounds with muted musical sigils. When Chris encounters the zombified Black maid, he intuits her Blackness is somehow erased: cue a Herrmann-esque high string whine. It musicalises tension, but one akin to the ‘freeze’ of a Black person halted by white enforcement. Similar fixed chords accompany the household’s domesticated Black people, portraying them as frozen statuettes. Harps tinkle throughout, echoing Rose’s mother stirring tea in her porcelain cup. This is her aural signal to induce hypnotism and entrap Chris, as she has done with the servants. When he first sinks into “the sunken place” after being hypnotised – wonderfully filmed as a flailing body descending into liquefied Blackness – faint rumbles of vocalised pain are released. Gothically, it conjures a hellish void; culturally, it ‘listens to ancestors’ and suggests a hymnal choir lamenting the watery mass graves of West African human chattel shipped to America.

At the film’s climax when Rose agrees to leave with Chris, uplifting music bathes them in romantic positivity (Rose still appears to be innocent of the Hermitage household’s insidious operations). But at this moment, the cloying music feels freighted with false hope. This is the sound of Black aspirational horror, knowingly attenuated by Peele and Abels. Shortly afterwards, when Chris strangles Rose, the orchestra unleashes a series of low pitched thwacks. The music isn’t simply violent; it sounds like the orchestra belting itself, masochistically ridiculing Chris’s belief not only in his love Rose, but in his imagined racial integration. This ‘hope’ theme is replayed over the end credits. With the Hermitage dynasty undone and Rose left gurgling in her own blood, the inference is that social equality is a better aspiration than romantic equivalence.

The second Peele/Abels collaboration is Us (2020). The intersectionality of asserted Blackness and aspiration digs deep into the story’s nightmare of Americans being terrorised by a nation of their animalistic doppelgangers (“the tethered”) who have escaped their underground imprisonment. If Get Out is Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner played in hell, Us stages The Cosbys there too. Discomfort abounds as Us mashes the generic, parodic and psychotic. Abels’s score is as much a charting of the wild tangents of this expansive horror allegory as it is a close tracking of how the family’s mother, Adelaide, deals with repressed childhood trauma.

Most importantly, the story centres on how Adelaide’s doppelganger, Red, is an aberrant figure in the netherworld of human copies. She breaks free from her psychic sub-terrain to exact revenge on the privileged world above. In doing so, she is a heroic ‘free slave’, as well as a nightmarish Other returned to ‘replace’ Adelaide (Black empowerment and The Great Replacement being persistent fears of white supremacists). Us gets even more complicated: suffice to say that Abels’s largely atonal compositions address these moral contradictions and awful sociopolitical repercussions.

The orchestral score can be readily identified through its standard ghost horror and human possession motifs: lots of scraping, screaming, sizzling spots and smears as Adelaide and her family are terrorised by their red-suited, scissors-wielding warring family. But as with Get Out, the audiovision of Us is crafted from more than simply turning up the tension dial in synch with on screen terror. My ear centres on many passages and sequences which recall Kubrick’s use of Krzyzstof Penderecki’s symphonic pendants De Natura Sonoris (1969 and 1970) in The Shining (1980). Both works are powerful avant garde miniatures inspired by Lucretius’s philosophical poem On The Nature Of Things. Kubrick reroutes those concepts to generate terror through an inexplicable unbalance of the ‘natural world’ once it is transgressed by cursed ghosts.

This is thematically replicated in Us, except instead of a single family isolated in a winter mountain scape, the focus is on, well, all of America, starting with those vacationing in Santa Cruz. Abels’s richly atonal panoramas evoke a widescreen collapse of US societal cohesion – ironically signposted by the ‘tethered’ rising to the surface world of the living to re-stage the humanist stage show of Hands Across America, first held on Memorial Day in 1986. With tracks like “Silent Scream”, “Down The Rabbit Hole” and “Human”, the score is less a liberation according to avant garde metrics, and more a decimation in its refutation of blues-infused harmony used so often to signify Black consciousness in US movie music.

After the film’s prelude showing the young Adelaide being caught in the hall of mirrors at the seaside carnival where she first encounters her doppelganger, Us hauntingly runs its title credits over a slow zoom-out from a single white rabbit to show a wall of its caged neighbours. Accompanying this is Abels’s “Anthem”: a Latin-esque choir coughing out staccato syllables, gradually erecting an aural picket fence upon what sounds like large, deadened West African drums. Jerry Goldsmith’s Black mass theme in Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) may come to many listeners, but instead of that Catholic scare fest, I recall Ennio Morricone’s liturgical pastiches for Alberto De Martino’s Holocaust 2000 (1976). That film is about the Anti-Christ being the son of a wealthy magnate who runs a nuclear power facility in the Middle East, and Abels’s anthem similarly forebodes apocalyptic horror on a massive scale – as signalled by characters holding placards referencing Jeremiah 11:11.

But maybe the tour de force of the film’s orchestral dissonance comes in “Pas de Deux”: a near-final battle between Adelaide and Red in the sealed off underground encampment. Red demolishes Adelaide with weaponised ballet moves in a terrifying return to Adelaide’s forgotten memory of watching herself practice in front of the dance school mirror. The timing of string plucks, double bass booms and searing metal guitar chords is slow, bludgeoning and excessive. But it’s also weirdly familiar – because it is versioned from the tinkling ‘hiphop horror’ motif of Halloween-style celeste of Luniz’s “I Got Five On It” (1995). The original track is first played in the family car as they travel to Santa Cruz; here it returns not to bond them but to bash them.

After the film’s exhausting twists and turns, the credits finally roll to Minnie Ripperton’s “Les Fleurs” (1970). This beautiful production by the inimitable Charles Stepney I feel has been playing silently throughout the whole film. Not that it is referenced, but that Stepney’s baroque arrangements from the immediate post-Civil Rights era is one of the best musicalisations of Black aspirationalism. Stepney’s cradling of proud songs by Rotary Connection, Ramsey Lewis, and Earth, Wind & Fire within his ripe Broadway-like orchestrations allow their voices to soar like free birds over their melting pot of blues, folk and soul. “Les Fleurs” could even be philosophised akin to Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris: the song is about being a flower pinned to a lady’s hair. This is a poetic post-human freedom, like that abstractly evoked by reaching the light at the end of the tunnel – or becoming untethered and walking freely upon the surface of a threatening world.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.