When you dive into the 72-Hour Horror Film Race, you know exactly what you’re signing up for: pure, sleep-deprived chaos. You get a theme, a prop, and a timeline that basically demands you abandon perfectionism and rely entirely on your survival instincts. But when the Good Morning Apocalypse crew and I tackled the race in 2017, we had a secret weapon to help us cut through the indie grit: Scott Cooper.
Scott and I have a long history of collaborating on music videos, but for The Beast, his music became the absolute backbone of our narrative.
At its core, The Beast is an exercise in tension. We wanted to play with the classic cinematic tropes of isolation and dread, building a moody, suffocating vibe around an assassin going through his methodical, quiet routine before returning to his victims. But when you’re shooting on a micro-budget with your friends, you can only do so much with heavy color grading and deep shadows. It’s the audio that actually sells the fear.
Scott’s track, also titled “The Beast,” gave the film its heavy, relentless pulse. It did the heavy lifting for the atmosphere, allowing us to wind the tension tighter and tighter while the tied-up victims debated the absolute worst ways to die. It created a genuine sense of cinematic gravity out of a microwave dinner and a glass of whiskey.
And that was the entire trick. We needed Scott’s music to make the dread feel dead-serious, just so we could completely undercut it at the last second.
The fun of this project is the ultimate bait-and-switch. You build up this horrific, atmospheric climax, only to aggressively pivot into a hilariously mundane workplace interaction and a nagging call from the wife about running errands. It’s that specific brand of disruptive comedy where you take the genre completely seriously until the exact moment you decide to ruin it.
Making The Beast was a solid reminder of how crucial audio is to storytelling. You don’t need a massive Hollywood setup to make an impact. Sometimes, you just need a killer track to set the mood, a solid absurd concept, some friends willing to be tied to dining room chairs, and the blind faith that you can fix the rest in post.
