If I ever needed more proof that Brooklyn Horror Film Festival was the place to be in October, my experience at this year’s live screening of Häxan with The Flushing Remonstrance was that.

The Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg is the primary home for the festival, and the host to what feels like a million different screenings. Each film feels like an outpouring of a director’s vision, of a cast and crew’s hard work over months, or even years. But one screening in particular among the repertory options on offer caught my eye, and that was Häxan. Part historical analysis, part horror, and part drama, there aren’t many films like this silent feature from Benjamin Christensen. And certainly, there are very few like it in terms of its age and impact: the movie is over a century old and still manages to grasp the intrigue, imagination, and emotion of audiences today.

But it was what was attached to the film that really intrigued me. Because this particular screening of Häxan was being played with a live accompaniment. I didn’t know what to expect from a group called The Flushing Remonstrance; frankly, I didn’t even know what to expect from a soundtrack accompanying a century old film as unique as Häxan. A set of percussion machines and a keyboard set were set up at the foot of the theatre screen, and soon two musicians approached them: Catherine Cramer and Robert Kennedy, the duo that makes up The Flushing Remonstrance.

The theatre dims, and the soft glow that comes off the lights illuminating their instruments becomes pronounced. The duo’s work blends into the film seamlessly. Their music is introspective, emotionally fine-tuned, and sonically bonded to what’s happening on screen with a level of smoothness I didn’t expect. There was a clear interplay at work between the film and the live score, and I knew then that I had to ask them how they did it. The Flushing Remonstrance was kind enough to entertain the question and spoke with us here at Horror Press about their process and history.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

An Interview With The Flushing Remonstrance on the Art of Live Scoring a 100+ Year Old Film

Luis Pomales-Diaz: So. Why exactly did you name yourselves The Flushing Remonstrance? I don’t want to assume you represent the Quakers, but… the name does raise questions.

Robert Kennedy: We were both working at a museum in Flushing, Queens, when we met. We got together for what we thought would be a one-off show. We would be live scoring vintage cartoons in a park. So, we needed a name, and after the usual process where we came up with a bunch of jokey names that would never fly, we landed on The Flushing Remonstrance.

Mainly because of geographical proximity, and it always sounded kind of ’60s like Jefferson Airplane. It wasn’t a particular political statement, although what the document represented and what they were doing, speaking truth to power, does resonate with us. We claim no representation of Quakers.

Tell us about your musical background. How does it factor into your live performances scoring films?

Catherine Cramer: We get asked a lot, almost every show, ‘how do you do this?’ and ‘is this a composed score or is this entirely improvised?’  And I find it interesting, because I spent the bulk of my musical career playing jazz, and I ask people if they know how that works first.

There’s the chart, a melody that can be written down, but then the bulk of what jazz musicians do varies from performance to performance. Who knows how many iterations of Autumn Leaves there have even been, but they all have their own measure of changes and improvisations.

Robert: We’ve been playing together for ten years, and we bring our improvisational ability and sensibility to [live scores] as our own thing. We’ve almost always played in the context of accompanying a film or a short film. If we hit something while we’re in rehearsal, we’ll run with it. But we don’t have written melodic content like a jazz quartet. Maybe like five percent of our material is identified pitches or chords, and those are primarily to ensure that Catherine’s percussion has a number of sounds that have tonal components, and that we produce either a consonant or dissonant effect.

The best way to describe it is: we are improvised, but we have defined the structure for a given film very precisely. As far as what sorts of sounds and feelings and what sorts of timing will accompany different sections and scenes of a film, it’s definite.

An excerpt from the Flushing Remonstrance live score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

And when you’re determining those feelings, that framework, what’s the process you go through? How many times do you watch the film through?

Robert: It’s somewhat of an automatic process at this point. We identify a film we want to play, we watch it through (separately, usually), and sort of chart out the architecture of it, almost like a storyboard. Scene by scene, where the scene is taking place, and what’s happening.

We then run the film together, and let the film guide our decisions when we rehearse. And whatever the filmmaker is suggesting to us, that’s what we do. Some films we’ve had to slave over a little bit more, sometimes, we’re particularly satisfied with the first go through. We have a great deal of instrumental rapport that factors into it, and we do it in a way that feels natural to us. So sometimes it comes easily.

Catherine: When we first run through a new film, like with Häxan, there’s a lot of stopping and going back, trying variations of the same scene. Each time through, we change or add something new. And even with the film we’ve played the most, Nosferatu, it’s always different. People come up who have seen us before to tell us our performance had a completely different feeling. It keeps the performances very alive in a sense, even when the film is somewhere around 100 years old.

What causes the variation between screenings of a film like Nosferatu that makes it so different each time, even after a decade of playing the film? What keeps changing, and why?

Catherine: No matter how many times we’ve played Nosferatu, there’s been a continual change. Sometimes it’s an instrumental change. On the Roland Octapad, the instrument that I play, there are a hundred different patches, and in each patch there are eight pads, and in each pad there’s up to as many as four sounds depending on where you hit it. Not including the volume and how you balance the sounds. And that causes radical changes in itself.

How we react to the film emotionally has changed a lot since the very beginning. We watch these films intently, and they guide us not just when we’re coming up with the framework. It guides us when we’re playing. We’re not just playing along but really bonding the music to the film. The last time we played it, it felt more sparse, more haunting.

And playing Nosferatu now, what emotions do you play to the most? What stands out to you more now than when you first started?

Catherine: With Nosferatu…it’s so sad. Nosferatu is a film I see as pathetic, in the truest sense of the word pathos. Orlok is such a tragic figure, and that sense has only grown each time we play it. In certain moments, when the man is walking down the middle of the street reading off the names of the dead during the plague, and every moment when Ellen is sitting by the ocean waiting for her husband to come home, all of the imagery strikes me so much more deeply. It’s those feelings that I’ve tried to accentuate.

Does the audience’s feelings factor into the performance to an extent?

Robert:The feel of the space, the sound of the room, but especially the feel of the crowd, are vital to how these performances keep changing. When we played Todd Browning’s The Unknown and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou in early November of last year, obviously, the presidential election had happened. Any audience we were playing for had that circulating in their head.

There were high emotions and clouded minds, and it was palpable. We brought into it an anger and intensity to a certain extent, because we were putting our own state of mind and our audience’s state of mind into it. Disorientation, paranoia, gloom, it made its way into the music. That’s how it is with improvised music often, you hear more traditional jazz, and you can tell when someone is having a bad night or if they’re sick. You’re not immune to being influenced by outside forces, and in our case, we lean into those outside forces.

A segment of the Flushing Remonstrance’s Nosferatu live score.

As musicians, you have about as many tools as filmmakers when it comes to communicating emotions through your music. Sometimes you even have more, depending on your instruments. Which emotions on film are the most challenging to communicate through your music?

Robert: I think a particular challenge is if there is a sustained scene of intensity. Sustained scenes of violence, a riot, a mob fleeing like in Metropolis. The end of The Phantom of the Opera is another great example, when they’re chasing him through the streets of Paris. The obvious approach is to pile it on, get really loud and clangorous. But after a while, it gets tiring for us and for the audience. You can’t put more water in a full glass. Those are the most challenging, assuring there’s a sense of dynamism while retaining that kinetic feeling. The goal is to maintain the integrity of the film we’re working with.

Catherine: The hardest for me are the spots where there is no emotion. In Nosferatu, we have this scene where the longshoremen are preparing the ship, we have a man reading off a list, men moving boxes, but really not much is happening. You can’t just have it be silent! It’s not until they dump out the dirt and the rats come out that you have something to do. But you can’t leave that dead air, which is hard to fill out. Playing to emotion isn’t necessarily easy because you want to do it well, but it’s the in between parts that get me. And silent films need to have in between parts because you can’t just have constant exposition.

Robert: I immediately thought of the Spanish language version of Dracula we did last year at Brooklyn Horror. There are these long drawing room scenes where they’re sort of just…talking. And like…well, there’s only so much we can do. And that film has a lot of it! (laughs) But then you also have very active characters like that version’s Renfield, who is really just chewing the scenery.

Oh, I truly love Pablo Alvarez Rubio as Renfield. He’s my favorite Renfield. The definitive one for me, I’d love to see what you play for him.

Robert: You know, I have to put in a vote for Tom Waits in Francis Ford Coppola’s version. Beyond the freakishness, he plays so well, there’s this sadness and desperation, being aware he’s a prisoner to Dracula, that’s great. On that note though, there is one thing we do the same every single time when we play Nosferatu.

After Orlok dies in the sunlight, it cuts to Knock in his cell looking out the bars, and he says, ‘The master is dead!’ And we always go to silence, every time. Because the death isn’t the climax, the climax is the aftermath. The spell has been broken, and the sacrifice Lucy has made for this guy…who in like, none of the films, really deserves it! And the silence punctuates that.

The Flushing Remonstrance original score for the Guy Maddin short Blue Mountains Mystery Séance.

For Häxan in particular, you do have quite a few scenes that are high intensity, and high emotion. The film is effectively a witchhunter’s manual, with all the historical cruelty that implies towards the women who are accused witches.

Robert: Absolutely! It’s based at least in part on the Malleus Maleficarum, an actual witchhunter’s manual.

It also has some generally raucous scenes of the witches. The black sabbath in the woods for instance. It’s an easy out to compose something quick and aggressive for that sequence. How did you determine what you wanted to do for that?

Catherine: It’s not an easy film to accompany. There are protracted scenes of torture, scenes of the accused women being interrogated and psychologically beaten down. One of the hardest there is the scene of the priest trying to force the young woman to use magic, to agree to show him so she can see her child again. It’s intense, but there’s subtlety you have to play for.

Robert: You know when that particular scene comes along, you’d think because of the nature of it you’d expect it to call for a big Rite of Spring, grand guignol, kind of raucous sound. But you have to break down where a scene starts and what it is. When it begins, we start with people sitting on a hilltop, and they see the witches flying off to the woods, and then you get the scene of the witches flying over the town. There’s not really fear or aggression in that, but rather mystery and a bit of wonder. So, we play towards that.

Then they get to the woods, and it begins, and that mass the witches start up is at its core a ritual. The question at the heart of it is ‘what sounds like ritual music?’, so we aim for something ritualistic. Someone’s instinct might be to play something like Carmina Burana, but it’s just not interesting. It’s obvious. It isn’t in the interest of the film or our interest to make it noisy or heavy or Stravinsky-esque, because that’s just not what the film is going for.

Häxan is over 100 years old. Though it has the indelible place in horror history, the story it tells and its cinematography, do feel very divorced from modern filmmaking. Is there an emotional disconnect from the way it’s presented that makes putting together the framework you work off of difficult?

Catherine: It’s a fun challenge, and a very different kind of challenge. It’s like a PhD dissertation turned into a film, which is not even factoring in the temporal quality that makes it so different on its own. It’s a shocking film, beyond the content but also shocking in the historicity of it and the sheer number of people killed and tortured in the name of stopping witches. Between 35 and 60 thousand dead. Like really? How many people died for this?

Then there’s also the fact that he brings in contemporary feminism into the film is fascinating, and tragic. Things are somewhat different a century later, but we’ve not completely moved past which is sad.

The film in its last quarter is agonizing. The dialogue it has on the concept of hysteria, and modern psychological medicine as opposed to contemporary notions of psychology…

Robert: I mean the fact that they call it hysteria tells you quite a bit…

Yeah, It’s not great. Interesting, compelling, but flawed in some ways.

Robert: In terms of trying to score a film that’s that old…we try our hardest not to let it change what we do. We take each film on its own level and try to be inspired by it. But we deliberately try not to make any attempt to emulate the music of the period. We avoid idioms, we try to avoid period music because it would be silly just trying because we are primarily using electronic instruments. Whenever it’s possible, it’s just us and the film.

The Flushing Remonstrance plays a live score for the Guy Maddin short “Saint, Devil, Woman”, part of his installation art piece Seances.

How has your approach to live scoring films affected your experience while watching film?

Catherine: I think my history with film itself influences it. I did film studies at NYU, then I worked for Millennium Film Archive for a while, which was a really fabulous place on East 4th Street that preserved avant-garde films. Then I was a film editor for about six years. All that to say, I’ve always been very conscious of the sound in films. I orient more to listening for that. Starting with the sound more than I’m seeing picture wise.

Robert: I come to it from a similar place. My background is a lot of audio production for records. Mix and loudness are key factors, and I can’t turn it off. If a score is too busy or feels cliché or gets in the way of the film, I just can’t ignore it.

Are there any films in particular that you would specifically like to live score in the future?

Robert: Absolutely. We luckily have a good long running relationship with Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, and the yearly festival theme guides us on what we’re doing next year. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm in us reviving our accompaniment to F.W. Murnau’s Faust, but this time with a completely different sound. We won’t retain anything from before, we haven’t played it since 2018, so this will be entirely new. It will have a bit of resonance with Häxan we suspect. There’s a Scandinavian film called The Phantom Carriage that has been on my short list as a film I’ve wanted to play for a long, long time.

We also love working directly with directors. We’ve been very fortunate to work with the filmmaker Guy Maddin, who makes contemporary films that are like silent films. Given our repertoire, we go together very well, and we’re very fortunate to have linked with a living filmmaker. We recently scored two very early Clive Barker films this past summer, one of which has never had a score. We contacted him, and he gave us his blessing. All that said, there’s not a formal list, but we know which films work with how our process and our style work, and we are excited to play them.

Catherine: I always look forward to working with contemporary working filmmakers.  And because of our background in avant-garde film, we’ve also been approached to score contemporary short films, and that’s been fun. There are so many different opportunities we’d like to score for. It’s New York, there’s always stuff happening.

Robert: And if you are a contemporary filmmaker who thinks your film would benefit from the sonic ministrations of a group like ours, get in touch with us!

A big thanks once more to The Flushing Remonstrance, who took the time to talk with us. You can follow their ongoings and adventures in live scoring on Instagram. A special thanks also to Brooklyn Horror Film Festival for connecting us.

And finally, thank you for taking the time to read this. Remember to stay tuned to Horror Press (@horrorpressllc on Twitter and Instagram, @horrorpress.com on Bluesky) for more interviews with creatives in the horror space, and for all news horrors!