Ever since Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year and screened at Fantastic Fest, there has been a lot of buzz around the coming-of-age supernatural/horror/drama. The dark tale follows a group of young children who become friends during the summer holidays, drawn together by the discovery of mysterious shared abilities. Out of sight of the adults, the children bond quickly, exploring their newfound powers and testing their limits in the forests and playgrounds surrounding their brutalist apartment complex. As the children’s loyalties shift and small cruelties escalate, their innocent play takes a dark turn towards the malevolent, and strange things begin to happen. Vogt’s second feature as writer-director stars Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, and Sam Ashraf alongside Morten Svartveit and Ellen Dorrit Petersen.

Last week The Innocents was officially released by IFC Midnight, so we wanted to shine a spotlight on one of the creatives involved, composer Pessi Levanto. Below Pessi breaks down his score for the film and much more. You can listen to Pessi’s The Innocents score here: https://open.spotify.com/album/654tOO1NjY2zA67gwltlKS. 

-What did you do to completely immerse yourself in the world of The Innocents to find the right tone of the film?

That took quite a bit of experimenting. First, I started with pure sounds from synthesizers to illustrate the purity of the kids but that didn’t feel right at all and sounded like a cheap 70’s science-fiction film so that idea was soon discarded. After that we decided to stick to acoustic instruments with real musicians, but to twist and play around with the sounds to make them unique. I think I submitted around five hours worth of different demos for Eskil (director) and Jens Christian (editor) to play around with in the edit. Quite soon some of them seemed more fitting to all of us and I concentrated on developing those ones further.

-Did you work very closely with the film’s sound designer? We heard that instead of melodies you sometimes used sounds around specific characters.

Yes, although that was during the worst Covid -period, so I didn’t get to travel to his studio and we just had to Zoom and send files back and forth. Indeed, we didn’t use actual themes at all for characters. I tried at first, but it seemed cartoony and downright corny in this world. We decided to go more abstract and the ”themes” became just sounds. Ben’s actions are often accompanied with gongs and Anna’s powers go along with a certain icy, glassy sounds I developed.

-Did you find that because The Innocents is classified in the horror genre, that you were able to experiment more?

Definitely. I had the opportunity to go as dissonant and weird as possible so I took much influence from various 20th century classical music techniques like spectral music and graphical notation.

-I would describe the pacing of The Innocents as a very slow burn. Did director Eskil Vogt want the score to match that or did he want the score to be more in the forefront?

It is a slow burn indeed. I think the music goes along with that pace due to Eskil’s request. There are only a few occasions where there’s more rhythm and drive but it’s still pretty far from action music! Maybe the slowly developing music makes time feel even slower, but we felt this pacing complemented all other stylistic aspects of the film.

-You have said that you did not want do a traditional horror film score for The Innocents. How would you say you put your own spin on the horror score?

An interesting, albeit scary, aspect of this process was that I had no references, really. There are not that many Scandinavian art-house horror films around so I felt like we were on virgin territory, so to speak. I guess the underlying idea was rather than to illustrate an external threat with the music but to portray the world as a place of wonder and excitement yet scary and menacing. The way we imagined the kids will see the world around them at that age. I think my spin was to use very organic elements and rather than having an obvious creepy nursery rhyme like ”Tili Tili Bom” I went whimsical, nostalgic and even pretty at times.

-There are a lot of bell sounding notes within the film’s score. What instrument did you use to create those sounds?

We did recordings with a Finnish experimental percussionist Mika Kallio who has a self-built rack of gongs of various sizes. I think there are around 25 of them in total. We recorded all kinds of little improvisations and individual sounds for a day which I then used in the writing process.

–The Innocents has been compared to Orphan and The Omen. What do you think about The Innocents being grouped together with those titles?

I don’t mind at all, they are very strong films and of course they all fall under the ”creepy kids” -subgenre! But I’m happy that The Innocents is still different from those ones and will hopefully stand on its own.

-Did you score the film in chronological order? Or did you save the heaviest scenes for last?

I think (as far as I can remember) I worked in a pretty random order doing one cue and then working on an another while waiting for Eskil to comment on the previous one. I usually like to begin with the most challenging and longest bits first to get them over with!

-What was one of the first horror films that made a lasting impression on you?

That must have been The Shining. Watching it far too young in the middle of the night alone in the house from a minuscule TV in my aunt’s house in Toronto in late 80’s was a memorable experience!