The end of the year is fast approaching, and I am currently still looking at a massive list of scores that I want to explore before 2026. I am also helping a fellow film music colleague with a project, which means I cannot afford to spend a lot of time on a single score for a review. Instead, please enjoy another batch of Spotlight reviews of scores from 2025, all three of which have something specific I want to talk about.
Frankenstein – Alexandre Desplat
The Frankenstein monster has been an icon of cinema for many decades and has appeared in more movies than I am willing to count. The most recent film, Frankenstein, is currently streaming on Netflix and is directed by none other than Guillermo del Toro. With Del Toro at the helm, it is not surprising that Alexandre Desplat was enlisted to write the score again. When I think about the music for the Frankenstein monster, I don’t really see Desplat, with his gorgeous melodies, as the ideal composer to write a score for a monster horror film.
However, with Del Toro, you will not get a traditional horror movie. For Frankenstein, he focused more on the feelings and emotions behind Victor Frankenstein and, as Del Toro calls it, The Creature. To enhance these features, the gorgeous, melodic, orchestral writing by Desplat is a perfect fit. What makes this score stand out is that while hearing some beautiful music, you can see some gruesome body horror on screen, with the waltz in “Body Building” as a perfect example. Del Toro’s vision and Desplat’s music made this film more than just a monster movie. I despise horror films, yet I was able to finish this movie, and the music by Desplat was an excellent motivator for me to do so.
Bugonia – Jerskin Fendrix
One of the things I love about film music is that it can be very diverse: from orchestral to electronic, from full of melodies and emotions to bland droning and ostinatos. Everyone has their own preference and taste, but what I can say is that the majority of those scores follow a set path: a particular set of rules that a director prefers. Yorgos Lanthimos is apparently a different kind of director, because his collaborator Jerskin Fendrix throws away all these well-established ideas and follows his own creative path in writing the scores for Lanthimos’s movies.
For their latest collaboration, Bugonia, a movie about a successful businesswoman who gets abducted by two people who believe she is an alien, Fendrix utilized the orchestra to create unique patterns and other musical ideas and melodies I have not heard before. The music creates a world of wonder by harnessing the full potential of an orchestra in a unique and innovative way. I heard something new and exciting in every track of the score. After listening to some uninspiring film music from big-budget movies, the music for Bugonia was a welcome break for me.
K‐Pop Demon Hunters – Marcelo Zarvos
A film I had been hearing about, especially from people with children, is the Netflix animation K-Pop Demon Hunters. It is a modern musical featuring songs with a K-Pop trio, who are demon hunters battling a demon boy band to save the world. After seeing the movie, I can imagine why it is so well-liked. It has a great original story, outstanding animation brought to you by the studio that also created the Spider-Verse films, and features catchy songs. While I love musicals from time to time, including this one, they also have one big drawback: not giving a score that ties all the songs together with the attention it deserves. For K-Pop Demon Hunters this becomes painfully clear, as the album features only two tracks composed by Marcelo Zarvos. These tracks are “Prologue (Hunter’s Mantra)”, co-written by songwriter Ejae, and “Score Suite”, which serves as a summary of the music.
With the film available on a streaming platform, I had the opportunity to analyze the music more closely. From the comforts of my own couch, I could appreciate the music Zarvos wrote between the songs, which featured some wonderful emotional moments and occasionally excellent integration of a song’s melody. I also liked the rocky music during the bathroom fight. Many of these musical moments are not included in the “Score Suite,” but you can hear some of them in the end credits. Some clever people on YouTube have extracted the music from the film and made a custom suite out of it, if you still want to listen to more of Zarvos’s wonderful score. It is a shame it has not been released. As one comment on the custom suite video said, “The instrumental tracks don’t get enough love,” and I totally agree with that statement.
