There are few filmmakers in recent years as busy as Osgood Perkins. He released Longlegs in 2025 and announced that he already had another film lined up for 2025. That turned out to be a lie, but only because Perkins actually had two films planned for 2025. In February, The Monkey, a Stephen King adaptation, was released in theaters. Ten months later, Keeper is the latest horror from the mind of Perkins. Composer Edo Van Breemen has seen into that mind and translated it to the sonic landscapes of The Monkey and Keeper.

These latest Perkins films are not Van Breemen’s first foray into the horror genre. His filmography bounces among many horror and documentary films. The two are quite different on paper, as horror seeks to scare while documentary, usually, exists to inform and enlighten. Van Breemen, however, sees a throughline for these two styles of filmmaking.

“Theme building is such an important part of documentary scoring because you might have a whole bunch of disjointed scenes and maybe, depending on what the subject matter of the documentary is, a bunch of disparate characters,” Van Breemen explains. “Music is a way to bring things together and keep the audience in the thematic world of that documentary. Just like I write character themes a lot in horror.”

“There’s also a lot of subtlety to documentary scoring. You’re not usually doing John Williams stuff. Sometimes it calls for more grand gestures, but a lot of the time it’s an underscore. It’s important to know where to do that in horror. To be a little bit lighter and ethereal.”

Another trick up Van Breemen’s sleeve is his work in somatic therapy, an alternative form of treatment that focuses on breathwork and body movement to help those struggling with trauma. While Van Breemen is not one himself, he has worked with somatic therapists to design spatial sound environments for healing. Knowing what he knows about this form of therapy, could Van Breemen use these powers for evil when composing for horror?

“With spatial sound, less is more. You have these really weird acoustic things you can do that kind of apprehend your nervous system and put you either in a heightened place or make you completely calm. It’s kind of like auto meditation.”

“I definitely bring that into my composing and my production for film. A lot of the work I do, I work with my friend Eugenio Battaglia, who was the sound designer for Longlegs, The Monkey, Heretic, so much more. We have this dialogue constantly about how composition and score production should be rendered in the mix.”

“I don’t compose in an Atmos setup, but I think with 4D sound and the possibilities for spatial mixing are limitless. I like to be constrained by a stereo field when I compose for film. When you want to make people feel terrified, using some spatiality is really effective.”

Perkins’ The Monkey and Keeper were shot back-to-back, but not on purpose. When the SAG and WGA strikes shut down production on The Monkey, Perkins pivoted. He wanted to keep working while on location in Canada, so he found crew, actors, and writers who could work without crossing the picket line. Van Breemen was originally only hired to score Keeper, but plans changed and Van Breemen was asked to write the music for The Monkey as well.

“The Monkey got scored in like six weeks. The whole movie, front to back, which was crazy,” recalls Van Breemen. “I did it with my friend Johannes Winkler, who is my co-composer on a lot of stuff. He’s my studio weapon. He’s an amazing idea man, a great composer and producer. We just locked in and blazed through that score.”

“Oz is a very team-oriented person. He’s such a dream to work with because he gives his artists a lot of creative latitude. He tells you, you’re the expert, I’m going to defer to you. He might have some sort of guardrails or a few big pins on the board, but he’ll let you connect the strings.”

“A lot of trust was built on The Monkey. For Keeper, it was very open. We watched it a couple times together and he had some references that were minimal. I just went and tried a bunch of things out. I was able to build some really weird themes out of bespoke sample instruments that I created for the score. We got a few really good musicians, a fiddle player, a saxophone player, and an opera singer. Then Johannes and I built this world, and then we’d bounce it off of Oz.”

Despite being made back-to-back, The Monkey and Keeper are different beasts of horror movies. The Monkey relishes the absurd. After all, its central force of evil is a toy monkey playing a drum. Keeper, on the other hand, looks to be more sinister and inherently evil. Very little information about the plot of the new film has been made available, just the simple statement that a couple (Tatiana Maslany & Rossif Sutherland) takes a romantic trip to a secluded cabin that has a malicious presence. What unites these two films is Perkins’ general approach to filmmaking.

“Oz works extremely well with silence. He’s a drummer, and his brother is an amazing musician who did the score for Longlegs. I wanted to work a little bit with some of the identifiers that I was witnessing in some of his earlier movies, but he also has a real reverence for classical filmmaking.”

“The pace of his filmmaking is spellbinding and effective. He knows where to break the tension and have a musical moment. He knows when to release the viewer from the grip of horror for a moment,” continues Van Breemen. “He also does a lot in the mix. He strips away a lot of music in the mix.”

“When we were doing The Monkey, it was like, okay, this cue is dead in the streets. That became our joking catchphrase. Greg Ng, the editor, even made a sticker that says ‘dead in the streets,’” laughs Van Breemen. “At first, I was like, oh, no, what’s happening. Then I realized that Oz was carving out this pace that is Lynchian or something. Where there’s absolute silence and only sound design or just dialogue.”

“I was able to anticipate that a little bit better with Keeper, which was cool. I really have a lot of respect for Oz. I think a lot of directors want to micromanage everything and sort of squeeze all the emotion of the film out of the music in these big moments.”

“With Oz, I’m learning that horror film music shouldn’t sound scary, it should feel scary. There’s a big difference. I think that also ties into my experience with spatial sound and working on these cinematic projects because if, as soon as you hear something, it bumps you out of the character’s experience, then you’re just in a montage world. He does it very deliberately. He’s like, either we’re in montage world or we’re in scoring mode.”

One of the main instruments used in the score for Keeper is a mangled saxophone. If you’re picturing Van Breemen taking a hammer to a saxophone to create the mangled sound, you’d be incorrect. The means of creating the “mangled” sound is a lot more technical.

“The sax was recorded and played by my friend Dave Biddle, who goes by Linda Fox online. He’s a critical theory professor at Simon Fraser University, and he’s a saxophonist who plays in a band called Jack Jay. He comes from a lot of different musical perspectives and he’s got this really cool pedalboard that he runs everything through.”

“I’ve worked with a lot of jazz musicians, a lot of classical musicians. Dave is somewhere floating around in the ether, and you got to pull him out of there and put him in the studio. He comes with his huge Husky dog who’s lying under the piano while Dave is just blasting really weird affected signals like to picture.”

“I would record him through an entire reel as he was playing around. I’d be like, do that again or can you use that pedal? We’d have some weird line distortion and be like, oh, let’s just use this. It sounds kind of terrible, but also we haven’t heard enough mistakes in film scores either. He’s really soulful too. That’s the thing. He connects with people on stage and I like to use live performing musicians on my scores.”

Another live performer featured on the Keeper score is Jen Bow, an opera singer who lent her voice to the ethereal selections. Much as Biddle improved on the saxophone, Bow did vocally as well to create an uneasiness to the score.

“We composed some stuff together. Jen is also the mother of a young daughter, so this movie was kind of ideal because she’s been singing a lot of nursery rhymes to her daughter. She was kind of living in that world,” says Van Breemen. “There was a note about the score needing to have a song that helped explain that Tatiana’s character was this returning mother.”

Van Breemen sings a little bit of the nursery rhyme Bow wrote: “Mother, mother, you’ve come home, you’ve left your daughters all alone. Go to bed, go to bed, you’re dead.”

“Something like that,” laughs Van Breemen. “I like to co-write, and that’s also reflected in how we split royalties, because I really believe that anybody who contributes to these things should have agency. That’s also what Oz is allowing me to do, so that just gets transferred to the people I work with.”

Much like Keeper, Van Breemen composed the score in an isolated cabin. His studio hideout is on an island an hour away from Vancouver by ferry. When writing for a movie and a filmmaker who rely so much on silence, how does one use music and noise to convey the overbearing weight of loneliness?

“The cabin was built in 1968 and it has all the original décor. It’s all wood, and it’s so weird,” laughs Van Breemen. “The feeling is a really similar environment with trees, moss, and weird little cliffs. There’s something you glean from spending time in those types of environments where it’s like, okay, now I hear a tree creaking or this weird bird flapping its wings or something in the tidepool.”

“For the score in Keeper, I wanted it to respond to its environment. The house is supposed to be creaking all the time with these entities moving around, and Tatiana’s character is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Eugenio and I went to the cabin and he recorded a lot of the sound design in that cabin and from the forest. We used elements of that directly in the blend of score and the sound design.”

“In particular, there’s one knocking sound that’s sped up or slowed down,” explains Van Breemen. “It was on a drum kit that I recorded on a loop. I just tried to scare myself. Turned all the lights off, played the drums at night, and tried to scare myself. I’m going to do this as a test to see if I can make something percussive sound scary.”

“I played it back, put it into the sampler, and I started speeding it up and slowing it down. I was like, oh, this is scary. Sometimes you kind of accidentally land on these things that become much larger than themselves. That knocking became the cabin theme for the whole film.”

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