‘Morbius’ Composer Channeled Bat Sounds & John Carpenter For Sony’s Long-Awaited Marvel Project

Almost three years ago, Sony Pictures debuted the first trailer for Morbius, a comic book film centered around the Marvel antihero known as “The Living Vampire.” The Spider-Man-adjacent offering was originally scheduled for a wide theatrical bow in late July of 2020, but the tentpole (starring Jared Leto in the titular role) was postponed no less than six times as a result of the COVID-19 health crisis.

Now, after all those delays, the long-awaited comic book feature is now playing on screens across the globe.

Written by the Dracula Untold duo of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, the project sinks its fangs into the origin story of Dr. Michael Morbius, a gifted scientist who suffers from a debilitating blood disease he’s lived with since childhood. Wanting to save himself and others from premature death, Michael engages in mad science experiments, mixing the DNA of vampire bats with his own diseased cells.

His efforts to find a cure is a success, but the resultant serum comes with a very large catch: the good doctor turns into a horrific, bat-like monster with an unquenchable thirst for human blood.

To musically reflect this Jekyll and Hyde dynamic between Michael and his accursed impulses, director Daniel Espinosa re-teamed with Swedish composer Jon Ekstrand who previously worked with the filmmaker on Child 44 and Life.

“You evolve together,” Ekstrand tells me of his professional relationship with the director. “Daniel … makes different movies every time. It’s really challenging for me and I really like that challenge. In a way, you kind of feel so spoiled that you get to discover new worlds in these kind of movies with these big budgets … I’d never done a superhero movie or Marvel movie before. I’m always up for the challenge and I think you should always try everything at least once. Daniel is always challenging you in a way that brings completely different movies to the table and we don’t get stuck in the same [routine].”

***WARNING! The following contains spoilers for the film!***

“From the get-go,” Ekstrand and Espinosa wanted to focus on the horror aspects of the story. “Quite early, we agreed to make the music a homage to the movies that we saw when we were kids and John Carpenter-style and those kind of things,” the composer recalls. “Also, the electronic music that we grew up listening to in the ‘90s when we went out.”

Referencing Victor Frankenstein’s famous exclamation from 1931, he adds: “I wouldn’t say we tried to emulate any of the classical horror movies, but we wanted to give it a classical vibe to it that’s more like, ‘It’s alive!’”

The end product was a synth-heavy score with traditional orchestral cues reflecting the hero’s transformation into a humanoid rat with wings.

“We really wanted the orchestra to sound like bats,” Ekstrand reveals. “We tried to find different things that the orchestra could do to resemble the sound of bat wings and squeaks and echolocation. I think that is usually the best part of the process — to bring out the whole playbook of sound.”

He and his orchestrator pushed the stringed instruments to their limits, coaxing out “atonal, arrhythmical” sounds “that would resemble the bats’ [location] in the cave at different distances … We also recorded these kind of things with the violins, violas, cellos, and basses [and] actually re-recorded it and made it into an almost submarine sonar sound and echolocation thing. We used [that] a lot through the score and re-sampled and played melodies with it … synthesizing it, which was really cool.”

The overall goal was “to portray Michael Morbius as a monster because what he’s doing is very questionable. He’s experimenting with bats and mixing it with [human] DNA and they have to do these experiments [in international waters]. Everything is morally and ethically very questionable, so we wanted to portray him like he’s building himself up to a monster.”

There was plenty of musical experimentation by the composer, who made full use of his personal synthesizer collection. “I just turned around in the studio and started picking my favorite synths and starting to do noises,” he adds. “Some of them have a life of their own so it was a lot of sounds, just experimenting and getting those weird things that we wanted to come out from it.”

Ekstrand began the scoring process for Morbius a year-and-a-half ago, but found it rather difficult to get to the United States when the embassy in Stockholm shut down at the onset of the pandemic. When he was finally able to secure a travel visa, however, he became the first Hollywood maestro to return to the Sony recording stage with a full (albeit socially distanced) orchestra. He describes the overall experience as “weird” and “special,” but nothing holds a candle — or in this case, a crucifix — to the anticipation and disappointment of seeing the movie postponed time and again.

“It’s great to see it released because I think every project is like an undelivered baby in a way,” Ekstrand says. “You get so into it and even if it’s good or bad, you just want it to be out in the world; get it out of the system because you have new projects that have to take [over] the headspace. I did a Danish movie [that was also delayed], but they only waited like half a year. That was hard, but [Morbius] has been one-and-a-half years. It’s been like, ‘Come on, let’s get it out already!’”

The film closed out its opening weekend with a total of $84 million in worldwide ticket sales, falling in line with early projections in North America. Given the title’s $75 million price tag, Sony may decide to wait and see if it’s lucratively viable to green-light a sequel. In a mid-credits stringer, Michael Keaton’s Adrien Toomes/Vulture (the MCU baddie from Spider-Man: Homecoming is transported to this universe by Doctor Strange’s botched spell in No Way Home) shows up with a tantalizing offer to form the Sinister Six.

If Marvel’s Living Vampire does return in another big screen adventure, Ekstrand hopes the studio will lean into the character’s horror attributes and break free of the limitations of a PG-13 designation. “I would love to see the [R-rated] sequel to this and have some carnage for real,” he concludes. “That would be fantastic.”

Morbius is now playing in theaters everywhere. Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Tyrese Gibson, Al Madrigal, and Jared Harris co-star. Click here to read the Forbes review.