Adapting a familiar property is never an easy task. When it comes to adapting video games, especially ones with a vocal following, it can be the devil’s task. When it comes to EA’s DEAD SPACE remake, sound was going to be an important factor. Full of terrifying scares and a dread-inducing score from composer Jason Graves, the bar was set high. However, composer Trevor Gureckis, a fan of the original game, was up to the challenge.

An award-winning composer in his own right, Gureckis has significant experience creating compositions that get under our skin. His most recent projects involve working hand-in-hand with M. Night Shyamalan on all four seasons of “Servant” and his body horror Old.  He received awards for his scores for “Servant” and Old at the BMI Film, TV & Visual Media Awards in 2022. His score for Old was also nominated for Best Horror Film Score for the 2021 HMMA Awards. In terms of crafting a distinctive hair-raising sound, the DEAD SPACE remake was in good hands with Gureckis at the composition wheel.

For the release of EA’s DEAD SPACE remake, Nightmarish Conjurings’ Dolores Quintana spoke with composer Trevor Gureckis, where they discussed his approach to designing the updated soundscape for the remake, the cognitive process behind the score telling its own story, and the connection between choral music and Unitology.

You’ve worked on the scores for M. Night Shyamalan’s latest projects, “Servant” and Old, correct?

Trevor Gureckis: Yeah, I worked with Night on four seasons of “Servant,” which is ending this season on Apple TV, and this movie that he shot right during the pandemic, Old.

Leading that into DEAD SPACE, how did you become involved with the remake of DEAD SPACE? Tell me a little bit about that.

Trevor Gureckis: I think that there were some people that were working at Motive [Studio] who were interested in my score to Servant actually. So, they had heard my music before, and so I got a meeting and got a chance to discuss more about what they’re kind of thinking what they wanted to do in terms of a remake. We discussed it more, and I was like, well, I’m a gamer myself, and I played this back in 2008. And so, they were super excited about that, as well, since I had a lot of experience with the material. We discussed the initial concepts, which are based on expanding the narrative, and finding new points of entry for the main character, Isaac, for him to have narrative story points and scoring those and looking into long-term things that happen over the course of the game, [the] musical ideas, and see if that was something that we could develop musically.

They gave me some of the selects from the actual pieces, and what I noticed is it seems like it’s a full orchestra and that you used a lot of woodwinds and then you go back to a lot of strings, but I did notice that it sounds like there are some electronic sounds and some glitchy sounds as well woven into each piece.

Trevor Gureckis: When I was working on it, I started out with a big picture [of the] vision about what we could do and what the direction was going to be, and I was writing 4-5 minutes suites that we’re about Unitology, which is the cult religion in the game, or Nicole, his love interest, and the big ideas. Nothing specifically, like, oh, this goes right here in the game, but more like the tone. During that, I was able to explore how I was going to [work around] the original score being used, which was always going to be a plan.

So, adapt to that and utilize some of the techniques and the performance styles that Jason Graves used in his original score, and find my place. I was interested in electronics and some closely miked things like violin and cello from a more intimate experience and terrifying in a way. Because you’re all alone on a ship, but you have these small instruments surrounding you at the same time.

And I’ve noticed that miking a stringed instrument just gives it such a thrilling feeling. It’s weird, but the violins are kind of thought of as a soothing instrument, but as soon as you electrify them, it becomes slightly terrifying.

Trevor Gureckis: Yeah, definitely. It’s all how you play it too. From playing on the other side of the bridge, or when playing all harmonics and sliding and everything. But, at the same time, as you noticed, it’s a full orchestra with a choir. We did that a total of [about]  nine dates across 2022. I write a bunch of music and then go record in Nashville, and then write a bunch of music and then go record and I did that three times. And so, I had the big sound when necessary, but then also got really close when I needed to.

I really liked the choral parts. I was kind of curious about what type of feeling or mood you were trying to bring out by using the choir.

Trevor Gureckis: That piece, in particular, is an experimentation on Unitology religion, so it kind of plays with liturgical concepts.

Like church choral music.

Trevor Gureckis: Yeah, but in all the wrong ways, because the main theme of the choir is singing pretty straight into playing the right tones. But I also have a friend of mine who’s singing, and she’s singing like a vocal fry style, and you can hear circling around the stereo image. So there’s always something a little off about something that seems normal. There’s a little extra in there.

Yeah, I noticed that about the choir just on the first pass. Obviously, this sounds beautiful, but what is it inside there that’s actually kind of disturbing?

Trevor Gureckis: I’m hitting my violin, and then there are other electronics that kind of like do whirling sounds, which are kind of like ship sounds a little bit. We discussed early on about music that kind of plays a little bit like sound design, a little bit musical. So, it kind of alternates between the two. I like to play with textures that are in those spaces, and a lot of that music that I’m imitating like [Krzysztof] Penderecki, the late 20th-century Polish composer. He was experimenting and doing that kind of thing to get the whole orchestra to do the wild sounds. Stanley Kubrick took that music and put it in 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Shining, and now we know that’s the sound of horror music.

But to him, it was not. It was the sound of what he thought was compelling and emotionally engaging about what he was writing. If you have ever seen a score by Penderecki, it’s incredible. Just the notation skill and the types of new notation used to achieve some of the stuff. I was doing some of those techniques myself, and then also having the orchestra imitate them as well.

How many suites did you make for the expansion of the original score?

Trevor Gureckis: From that position of sorting out the lore of what’s the style of the score, there are four or five things, and then got into a little bit of nitty-gritty detail about redoing the Hunter, which is one of the main bosses and then let’s also do Leviathan. So, then I started to rescore major scenes game. The final leg of working on the game was actual cutscenes, which I was getting mocap examples, [with the] green screen actors and what the performances were possibly gonna look like, and then I would score the ideas. But I never got to play the final game until now.

So, overall, what were you trying to bring to the game with your music? Especially, anything that you feel might be slightly different from the original.

Trevor Gureckis: The first goal, as I said, was a narrative angle and making more connections. So, there would be a deeper connection with Isaac and his journey, his journey to hell, in a way. There are definitely some more emotionally driven cues. My first question when I was hired was just to make sure that I knew exactly what I was getting into and that I could achieve this very clear, narrow path, and then it widened as I progressed. I started writing more music as it made more sense to do more things. But I think it was important to have a very clear goal of connecting more dots and wanting to write.

What do you think about the emotional underpinning or goals of film and game scores? What is it that you’re trying to do? The emotions you’re trying to get viewers and gamers to connect with.

Trevor Gureckis: It’s like a cognitive thing, right? It’s like, oh, that theme that I heard when you’re experiencing cutscene, and it has the Hunter’s theme in the middle of it. The Hunter’s theme comes up later, and you actually see the hunter., and these are the points of connection that [help] connect the dots of [this] musical story. You’re able to follow it. The musical narrative has some cognitive sense to it. You feel that you can understand what’s happening, or understand why you’re hearing something. I think that makes a lot of sense. That’s a good question for a composer to ask themselves when they’re scoring a scene. How they’re scoring the scene? What kind of music they’re using, and it all helps guide the decisions that they make. So, if it starts to collect a little bit, then you have the legitimacy of why something occurred, later on.

That’s actually really interesting because there’s obviously the story narrative going on, but it seems film scores and game scores also have a connected narrative of their own.

Trevor Gureckis: Internal logic in a piece of music is really helpful, especially if it’s thematically based. Anything that has themes, you can have textures, or have a particular instrument there. Recalling back to that place gives you a reason for why you came back there, especially if you’re writing a lot of music for a game or a show or something; it’s really helpful to have a valid reason. For the viewer, I think it’s a subconscious thing because there’s so much going on. It’s hard to grasp everything all at once. It’s one big, huge flow of information, but it does give you some guidance as to why something is happening.

It’s just it’s so interesting to think of it. Usually, people just think, oh, it’s just music in the background, but subconsciously as you said, they’re being given another avenue. Their brain is being given another sensory avenue to understanding the narrative as a whole.

Trevor Gureckis: If things are all connected really well or thought out really well, then it reinforces [the story]. It’s a supportive role and can be really helpful in that way. It can be harmful too because it can be misleading or it can misdirect in the wrong way. Music can be overpowering, but I think that it’s an interesting field and interesting skill of figuring that puzzle out.

For the basis of your compositions, do you work from keyboards?

Trevor Gureckis: Yep, pretty much. My undergrad degree was as a trained pianist. I definitely compose by playing a keyboard sample or something. But I do lay down on my violin and cello, as well. Textures and stuff do help.

How do you feel about the soundtrack and your work?

Trevor Gureckis: It’s definitely the most intense, crazy thing I’ve done so far. So in that way, it’s exciting. It’s the biggest task I’ve had, professionally, which was also a big undertaking of just the amount of music to get orchestrated, and get recorded, mixed, and delivered. It was a lot of work. It has a lot of sprawling cues that are both horror on the most fundamental level, but there are also those more ambient ones as well that are nice. They’re still disturbing, but it still has kind of like a Space horror, which reminds of the score to Alien. There’s a melody to it, where it describes loneliness as well. That’s a variety, I guess

Do you have anything coming up that you can talk about?

Trevor Gureckis: Yes, I’m currently working on a new Apple TV show called “The Crowded Room.” It stars Tom Holland, and it’s show run by Akiva Goldsman. Stylistically, it’s the complete opposite. It’s more along the lines of the score that I did to The Goldfinch back in 2019. So it’s a more piano-driven melody drama. It’s a nice break from horror. It has its intensity and its thrill but you’re not watching over your shoulder

You can hear Trevor Gureckis’s original soundtrack music for the DEAD SPACE remake here. Learn more about the DEAD SPACE remake here.

The interview was edited for clarity and length.

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Dolores Quintana

Dolores Quintana is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. She has written for blogs as diverse as Buddyhead, Pocho.com, and The Theatre @ Boston Court. She works as an actor in independent film and both immersive and traditional theatre with Alone: an Existential Haunting, Screenshot Productions, and Native Voices at The Autry.

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