January’s horror release slate has been filled with everything from IFC Midnight’s viral sensation Skinamarink to Universal Picture’s box office hit, M3gan. Another title worth paying attention to is RLJE’s alien tale, Kids vs. Aliens directed by Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun, V/H/S/2, and Vice TV’s hit Dark Side of the Ring). The film premiered at Fantastic Fest last September to positive reviews and ever since, horror fanatics have been clamoring to see the wild sci-fi ride. That wait is finally over as Kids vs. Aliens is now in select theaters and VOD and will released on Shudder at a later time.

In the below exclusive interview, we spoke to one of the film’s creatives, composer Andrew Gordon Macpherson (Tales from the Territories, Dark Side of the Ring), about everything from working with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra to getting inspiration from old PlayStation games for the Kids vs. Aliens score.

How did you first hear about Kids vs. Aliens?

I heard about Kids Vs Aliens when the director, Jason Eisener sent me the script out of the blue in August of 2021. I was at the end of scoring fourteen TV hours of season 3 of his series (Dark Side of the Ring) and thought it was something they were just shopping around, but in reality, it was only months away from shooting! I’m a massive fan of the original short (“Slumber Party Alien Abduction” from V/H/S), so I was super excited he was doing something like that again and wanted me to score it. The script was awesome and even though I was busy on DSOTR, I wrote ten demos for it that weekend after reading it. A couple of them ended up as the basis for some cues in the final movie.

–How would you describe your score for the film?

It’s a non-stop melodic tour of classic fantasy/adventure and horror film music, action figure commercials, synth smothered pop and audio anxiety. It pushes very hard, but has some (hopefully) memorable themes and musical moments like some of the greats.

-Did the film’s director, Jason Eisener, have a pretty specific idea of how he wanted the score to sound or were you able to experiment?

Jason has really bold musical ideas and so do I, so when we approach making movies together, we arrive at some pretty insane places.  He sent me a script and a bunch of links to music from old PlayStation games, folk instruments, obscure internet bands that are inspiring to him… I then wrote him demos of my ideas from the script… Then he plays them on set to hype people up…Then I see the cut and I think I just got possessed by a demon that needed to rise to power of his filmmaking. It’s wild, but somehow it works and sometimes it really feels like something from beyond comes through.

-You have worked with director Jason Eisener on other projects. How was your experience different on Kids vs. Aliens than previous titles?

I have scored 40 episodes of TV with Jason for Dark Side of the Ring and Tales from the Territories but this is our first scripted feature together.  With TV, it’s very fast paced and after we brainstorm, I’m alone in a room bending the rules and stretching my mind as much as I can to make a great collection of music under a deadline. Jason and Evan (Husney, co-creator of DSOTR) are doing the same in the editing room and hopefully, the music helps it all stick together. Kids vs. Aliens didn’t have drastically more time, but I hired a lot more people: mainly, Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and Cinemagic Scoring to record half of the music, my orchestrator RJ Satchithananthan, a couple of editors from Half Moon studio in Toronto and I also collaborated with Judge Bitch on the opening theme song. Creatively, Jason and I just needed to slide back into that energy we’ve drawn from each other on DSOTR over and over, but transmit it across more people and a bigger screen.

-Was there a scene in Kids vs. Aliens that was particularly difficult to score? Why?

There’s a love scene between Sam and Billy with a little awkwardness at the start that was challenging because at that stage in the movie Billy is sort of a villain but MAYBE he’s not to Sam.  In that situation, my musical “voice” can play the beats, or tip the hand of where the story is going or just live in the emotion of one of the characters, which, when I played it with empathy for Sam, worked, and when I tried those other strategies, it didn’t.

-We have heard of composers using “found objects” to create musical sounds. Did you do anything like that for Kids vs. Aliens?

Jason sent me a video of a man playing a conch shell at an in-door swimming pool that he found interesting. I wanted to elaborate on that and met with a sculptor/fabricator about making some sort of a “UFO wind/percussion instrument” which seemed like a really fun idea, but I ended up creating something sonically similar to that conch with some friction mallets, a bunch of different drum heads and some crazy non-linear reverbs.  The other thing though, is the movie ended up being much more of a MUSICAL RIDE that is sort of like a teen movie with pop music at the start and then really high energy horror/adventure from the halfway mark to the end, so there weren’t going to be a lot of quiet moments to appreciate a lot of found, scary textures. We needed power and energy, big drums, big synths, fast strings and mad brass for the last 40 minutes!

-You have scored a lot of horror films, why do you think your music resonates so well in this genre?

A few years ago, I scored a video game called Far Cry 5: Dead Living Zombies and on that one it was necessary to do a deep dive on all the sub-genres of horror music. I had done some horror stuff before that, but that one really sharpened the axe. I’ve also edited a few horror films and I think I have a feel for how to manipulate the pace and tension and the emotion in a scene. My music production chops are pretty honed for “cool scary power” and strange ambience that has worked for a few directors’ visions and hopefully will for many more.

-Is there a recent horror series or film you have watched where the score particularly stood out to you?

I love what Mac Quayle has been doing (Mr. Robot, American Crime Story, American Horror Story), and they just got Britney Allen to take a couple of the American Horror Story episodes. She’s a brilliant horror composer that I met because each of our first features as composers (“The Ranger” and “What Keeps You Alive”) both premiered at the same SXSW, so I’m rooting for her.  I think Natalie Holt’s the freshest new blockbuster composer, especially after her take on Fantasy/Sci-Fi/horror on Loki. Other than that, there’s Daniel Lopatin’s score in The Viewing (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities) that was really fun. I loved his scores for the Safdie brothers too of course, but OPN has been on my radar for maybe 10 years and it’s nice to see another weirdo electronic music guy, like myself, get a break on some awesome movies.