A Childhood Dream Come True
MEGAFAUNA on the big screen.
February 19th, 2025, at the Hollywood Theatre in Vancouver, BC, there was a screening of the 1922 masterpiece, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. This, in and of itself, would be noteworthy - Nosferatu is an enduring classic of German expressionism, and of horror. It is moody, scary, and stunning - even more than 100 years later.
This screening, however, was special to me in specific, because it featured a score that I wrote. Here it is, you can listen to it while you read this.
In October of 2024, I went on my first tour as MEGAFAUNA. I played five shows, during each show I provided a live and improvised score. At the end of the five shows, I compiled elements of each performance until I had a version I was pleased with, and that was released as To The Land of Ghosts, my score for Nosferatu.
This could have been the end of the story, truly, this tour was really meaningful to me, and something I never thought I would ever get the opportunity to do. The response was extremely kind and positive, the tour broken even more or less, and I had a very unique piece of work under my belt. It didn’t make me rich, and certainly won’t - but I do want to do it again, so that says something positive. Hell, I even felt confident enough to play around with makeup and more performative pieces, which was new and exciting.
So that’s all, right? Tour ended, album released, passion ignited. Good job, now everyone go home. From there, I got it in my head that - maybe - I could do more, maybe I could convince a movie theatre to play it; probably not, but maybe.
Cut to: a few dozen e-mails unanswered, and a reinforcing of my thought that no one would be interested.
Enter: The Hollywood Theatre.
Not only did they write back, but they were enthusiastic about the idea and wanted to get it up on screen pretty quickly. So, the date was set, February 19th, 2025 - my score attached to one of my favourite films of all time was going to be shown on the big screen.
I grew up loving movies, I went to film school, I still love movies - the idea of having something I made screen in a theatre is something I would have always dreamt of, but at this point in my life, I had more or less written that off as a possibility. What with me … not working in film or making movies. Yet here we are, my name is on a marquee, a movie I love is screening, and I provided the music for it. The utter weight of what this means to me isn’t something that I can adequately describe. Seeing the picture above just about reduced me to tears.
It was made all the harder by the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to attend, geographically and financially it just wasn’t going to happen. My emotional reaction persisted all the same.
The response to the screening was positive, though not to me directly. The folks at the Hollywood Theatre relayed that people were into it, and that’s great. I even made a little bit of money, which was also cool. I’m hoping to be able to take a live-scored screening to them next year, but we’ll see how that goes.
I took a break from writing this for like two weeks, I felt deeply self conscious and like this was some kind of self-satisfied gloating, but honestly, I don’t think it is. I just feel… good about something that I created and I wanted to reflect on that. Something that I’ve struggled with most of my life is placing value on my self and my art and my expression, so here’s me actively trying to push that aside.