Louisville Orchestra scoring classic movies as part of (Un)Silent Film Series

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The Louisville Orchestra is getting in the spooky spirit by adding music to classic silent films as part of its (Un)Silent Film Series.

This weekend, you can catch Louisville Orchestra's updated version of the iconic horror flick Nosferatu at The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts.

The composer of the piece, Sebastian Chang, along with Adam Thomas, the orchestra's operations director, stopped by WDRB Mornings Wednesday to talk about the upcoming performance.

"The Louisville Orchestra likes to do films with live orchestra," Thomas said. "That's a pretty common trend over the past five to ten years."

Thomas said this one is different because "in those films, the score has already been written. It is what it is, it's familiar. With this one, Nosferatu does not have a score associated with it, it was a silent film. And back in the silent film era, you probably had a piano player sitting there playing live, maybe making it up as he goes."

That's where Sebastian Chang comes in. He was hired to create a unique score for the movie.

Chang said "it took a couple of months" to complete the original score. "I had to write pretty quickly."

Chang said "the piece uses different motifs to represent different characters. Because there's no dialogue it depends entirely on the music to feed the audience the emotions that I want them to lean towards when they're viewing the film. I did a short score of about four staves, and then I expanded that out to orchestration."

For inspiration, Chang said he used "all the great composers of the Classical tradition, and probably all of the old Hollywood scores, from the 50s or the 70s."

Nosferatu is based on the story of Count Dracula.

"This is the original vampire movie, all the way back to 1922 when it first came out," Thomas said. "It's been scaring audiences for years, and we hope that they'll be spooked and also have a good time hearing some new music."

There are two upcoming performances of Nosferatu at the The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts: Oct. 27 at 11 a.m., and Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m.

CLICK HERE to get tickets.