MRH: I got the impression from the music, and certainly form the guitar solos that it was just a heck of a lot of fun to perform, like a jam session.

MW: Definitely. There’s no question. There were no boundaries in that regard; if you wanted to really go crazy on the guitar is was completely okay. Tempos and things were really wide. Some things I did were very slow, and some things were above 200bpm.

I was just able to go with it and try and achieve something that was really aggressive, or in the case of Dollface, the main female character, I did this very twisted version of a little girls’ choir singing almost like a lullaby that’s run through all these distortions and other effects so it sounds very de-tuned and ‘off’. Even though it’s still a little girl singing, the combination of those two things made it very eerie and kind of masks the completely psychotic aspect of that character.

MRH: For the soundtrack album did you have to make any unique editorial choices to make it fit?

MW: The edits from the soundtrack were actually done by the music supervisor…I was pulling my hair out, trying to think ‘How am I going to condense all this stuff down?’ I had made a few attempts and I couldn’t come up with pieces that were short enough, and then he went and did his version, and it was actually better because he was looking at it from the non-composer standpoint; he needed to get the best ideas across, so I think he actually had a better perspective in that regard… I thought they were very representative of what was in there.

MRH: Last question – You’re working on a horror film called The Haunting in Georgia, and I wonder if the director’s part of Patrick Lussier’s colleagues, because I think Tom Elkins was one of the editors on Lussier’s films?

MW:  Yes. Tom Elkins, the director, has worked with Patrick quite a bit, but his style is very different in terms of how he uses music, and his actual personal filmmaking taste and his choices.

Haunting in Georgia is something that I really wanted to do because it’s very different, in terms of tone. It’s not the high-octane in-your-face stuff that I’ve done in the past; it’s very eerie and subtle and creepy. It’s actually been a lot of fun to find a way to creep people out using very little as opposed to having these massive, dense cues, so that was a component that was really appealing.

There’s also a family drama taking place that’s very poignant, and Tom wanted to highlight that. There are strong family themes in the film that would be classified as Southern Americana. They’re actually big sweeping themes, recurring lines and strings, and some of it using guitars and other instruments that are most associated with that part of the country, but it’s a big juxtaposition from what I’ve done prior to that, even though it could be considered the same genre.