Musique Fantastique

September 27, 2021

Anton Sanko Scores THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR, Now Playing on Shudder. Digital Soundtrack Released

Scored by Emmy Award winning composer Anton Sanko, THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR is a horror-thriller film written and directed by David Charbonier and Justin Powell. The film stars Ezra Dewey, Lonnie Chavis, Kristin Bauer van Straten, Scott Michael Foster. The Charbonier/Powell debut feature focuses on two boys attempting to escape their kidnapper’s house. Interestingly, this is a film in which children are the heroes but the film is not a children’s film on any level.

The thriller premiered at last year’s Fantastic Fest and was released on the streaming service Shudder on July 29, 2021. The soundtrack is available from Amazon and other major digital music services.

The film has received mostly positive reviews. Justin Lowe of The Hollywood Reporter called the film a delicate and memorably successful balancing act that effectively contextualizes some deliberately challenging material, while Richard Whittaker of The Austin Chronicle called it a perfectly-executed game of cat-and-mouse, twisting the tension in perfect real time. Dennis Harvey of Variety commended the effective use of a simple premise and modest means to create a nicely nerve-jangling thriller. Dan Stubbs of NME gave the film five out of five stars, describing it as convention-breaking and undeniably brilliant, though very difficult to watch.

The emotional complexity of THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR is assiduously depicted by the Sanko’s dreamy, expanding and contracting and at points interrupted, electronic score. The minimalist and beautiful eerie guitar theme in “Six Hours Earlier” and beautiful ethereal harmonies in “Resolution” mirror the inner normality of the protagonists’ world, interrupted by violence. Sanko observes “Composing the score to THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR was like taking a deep dive into the depths of human depravity. And I mean that in the best possible way. David and Justin’s directorial style opened up a lot of space to explore as a composer, and I got to work in a musical sandbox that I really love.”

-via Silva Screen Records and other sources

Watch the film’s trailer below: