San Francisco Symphony Performs a Live Score of 'Get Out'

By Rae Alexandra

It grossed $255 million worldwide, won Jordan Peele the Best Original Screenplay Oscar (making him the first-ever black recipient of the award), garnered a mountain of critical acclaim and instantly made a mark on pop culture. Adding to the many reasons to appreciate Get Out, the San Francisco Symphony will accompany a screening of the movie the night before Halloween.

The chilling original music for the film was masterminded by Michael Abels, a composer based in Southern California who had never scored a movie before. For inspiration, Peele sent Abels some examples of music he found “terrifying,” including Latin chants, old blues and other soundtracks.

“The music had to have the emotional depth that the music in a Hitchcock film has,” Abels told Crack magazine in 2017. “I was really shooting for that.”

“There’s a kind of rhythmic pulse to the score which is unlike a normal suspense score—it’s a lot more modern,” Abels continued. “Whenever we needed a sound which was unfamiliar, we would look to strings or rattles—something based in the natural world.”

The SF Symphony’s Film Night offers a stellar program—including Coco, Ghostbusters, It’s a Wonderful Life, Apollo 13 and Love Actually—for the rest of the year. Get Out is sure to be a highlight, bringing an acute creep factor to a movie already brimming with claustrophobic terror.