“Nine Bodies In A Mexican Morgue” is a British thriller television series created and written by Anthony Horowitz that premiered earlier this spring on MGM+. The series follows nine strangers marooned in a Mexican jungle after an aerial disaster. However, when they start dying one by one, the survivors must solve the mystery of who is killing them off. Composer Chris Roe was kind enough to spend some time speaking with us about his music for the series, which you can read about below. Please be sure to check out the series, which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Thank you, and enjoy!
Hi Chris, I’m excited to speak with you. My name is Sarah Abraham, and I am a writer for Offscreen Central. However, this is going to go onto a different site, so I’m very excited about that. I’m classically trained as a clarinetist. I have my Bachelor’s and Master’s in music, and I have been teaching recreationally in music and various academic subjects for a while. Naturally, I’m thrilled about this interview.
Oh, cool!
Yeah, I see some cool stuff in the background.
Yeah, different string instruments and synths and other stuff.
Can you tell me a bit about your musical background? When did you start playing, and what ultimately led you to composing for film and TV?
Yeah! I started playing piano very young when I was five years old and loved it, but I always liked making up my ownmusic more than playing what I was meant to be learning. So that led me to at school, I was always, like, getting bands together and writing music for friends. Then, I ended up going to university to study music and got more into musical theater, writing, and musical directing. I realized I always loved writing music or being involved in music for something else, not just for music’s sake, but like, how it could work with drama. I started to turn my attention more to how music works with pictures and for film scoring. I had quite an experimental music training and classical music training, but I also really liked pushing the boundaries of contemporary classical music, doing really weird stuff with the instruments, and seeing what sounds you could get. So, I kind of took some of that forward and started doing documentaries. First, I worked with some cool feature documentaries, and then I gradually found my way into drama, TV, and film drama.
I learned about multiphonics, and I got to experiment with those in undergrad and grad school. There definitely is a lot of variety within music in general, and I think people have a limited view of what classical music can entail, especially the study of it. So, that’s really cool to hear you talk about that. Going on to the show, “Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue,“ and working on that; Congratulations! It must have been a really fun experience for you. The show is a thriller following an air disaster. What was the process of even creating a score where you have to help capture strangers stranded in a jungle?
It was a great challenge, really, because the show is like a mixture of mystery and horror, but also comedy and a kind of lightness. We know that from the very beginning that everyone dies, you know, from the title, and we see the bodies very early on. So, we wanted to stay with the characters, and you want to be in those moments. You want to feel horror and mystery, but it’s also about the fun of working out who does it, like an Agatha Christie novel. So, really, one of the things we tried to get from the beginning was how dark to push it and also keeping a lightness and fun to the score. So, the process was really fun, working with the director, Brian, and the whole team. I was lucky enough to get on board reallyearly, kind of as they were shooting, and I’d be sending just musical ideas, so nothing to picture, but just testing really how far we could push the dark horror aspects and trying out loads of different kind of Mexican instruments and Aztec instruments and things because, as you said, it’s based in the rainforest. That was a real kind of gift for a composer, to be able to mimic the sounds of the rainforest and, like, create the sense that all the animals were looking on and they were the ones that knew all the secrets.
You’re foreshadowing my future questions. You talked about the Aztec instruments, and it was super cool learning about those instruments, the timbres they make, what they are allowed to do, and what they can do that traditional European instruments cannot. When composing this, did you feel that differentiation between working on your other films that don’t have that Aztec tone to it?
Yeah, definitely! We wanted to be careful not to just be obvious with it and be like, “Oh, it’s set in Mexico, so we’re going to use some Mexican instruments.“ I think what’s different about those kinds of instruments is that they really feel like they’re from the landscape, and they’re not a cultural thing. They’re more things that have been crafted from, like the wood of the rainforest, and, like, feel very natural. So, rather than being set in, like a culture, it’s more about the setting and, like, the visual landscape. So, they’ve all got a real, natural quality to them. I think what’s also great about instruments like that, and also things that I can’t play very well, is that it kind of as you’re playing them, the ocarina, for example, plays like one of the main little themes in the show. Because I am not a trained player, there were mistakes that would come out, which actually were, kind of, really cool and quirky things that you can, if you record things so many times, you can then single out the mistakes that are cool, and get rid of all the rest of the stuff. So, they definitely threw up interesting pitches and things that sounded a bit off but which kind of added to the oddness and lightness of the score in those moments. It was kind of a combination of that with a more, with my kind of more usual palette of strings, percussion, and synths.They were a great, kind of interesting element on top of what I usually use and, yes, sort of led me down interesting paths that I wouldn’t have gone down if I hadn’t explored those instruments.
I think it definitely did. You mentioned the sounds that they make and that this is part of the nature of the show, and it did lead to… you feel that nature and the animals are stalking the main characters. It was really cool, and I enjoyed it. Can you talk about how you were inspired specifically by the plane crash element to create the sounds of the engines and the propellers and all that? What went into that?
Yeah, so the plane crash happened right at the beginning. When I’m starting a project, I’m really trying to think about anything that I can pull from, or like, any interesting parts of the setting or the show that might have some kind of sonic element that I could explore. So, yeah, just with the idea of a plane crash, and there’s a lot of communication in this show.They try to set up a transmitter that doesn’t work, so there’s lots of kind of radio loss, loss of contact, and radio static, like when the plane’s going down, the pilot can’t get through on the radio. So, one thing that we worked on quite early was getting the sounds of radio static, chopping them up, and making them into drum beats, like a high hat kind of rhythm. It’s a different kind of sound. Also, another thing that we tried was getting the sound of a propeller engine and then pitching it, sampling it, and making it into something that I could play on the keyboard. That actually ended up weirdly sounding a bit like a kind of pan-pipe, synth sort of thing. So, that kind of fits well with the central, South American kind of thing. So, yeah, it’s kind of a lucky accident, but it’s quite a weird, ominous, like airy sound, which plays the main theme. There were lots of things that didn’t work, like what we tried with those propeller sounds, and they were just too heavy, or too obviously a plane, you know, but the one that we landed on was a cool kind of mixture.
I think it’s that last point that you made, that there were lots of things that didn’t work. This is somewhat, I guess, off-topic, but when I had to take a composition forum in college, and that was the subject I struggled with, it solidified that not everyone can be a composer because there will probably be a majority of the time, your creations won’t work. It is that acceptance, but it should also drive you to move forward to eventually get to the outcome that works and that you’re very proud of. That really resonated with me. I admire everything that you composers do.
Yeah, you have to get used to things not working and rejecting ideas. That was one of the things, I think, to learn rather than trying to, like, hang on to it and make it work. Sometimes, you just have to be open to rejecting it and moving on to the next one.
It’s a lot, and it takes a type of intelligence that you should be very proud of. So, I really do commend composers. I respect them so much. What was probably your favorite aspect of working on this show, and then the most difficultaspect that may have surprised you?
I think some of my favorite moments in the show were really kind of, like, the dramatic high points of the show, where suddenly all this tension that’s been building up can be released. There’s a moment at the end of Episode Five, I think,where two characters are up on a clifftop. They did a great job of dressing the set like it was covered in fog and kind ofclassic horror movie stuff. The characters couldn’t see around them, and so we create a lot of tension with the music, but then suddenly you see the killer comes to them, and so those kinds of moments were a lot of fun where you could reallylean into the music, and we didn’t have to be too subtle. We could really have fun with the music. But, you know, I think you got to earn those moments. So, for the rest of it, there’s a lot of tension bubbling away. I think some of the hardestmoments were in episode one because it’s the first episode that you’re scoring, and you’ve built up all these ideas that you want to try. So, you end up trying maybe too many things too early on. Yeah, you kind of got this box of tricks that you’ve been working on with the director, but for a lot of the first episode, not much happens, and it’s all about establishing the characters and the relationships between them. That was one of the challenging things, I think, was calibrating, like, how much to do in that first episode, when the characters are all just sat around after the plane crash and reeling from the shock, and actually, there are not many suspicions yet, because there’s no reason to be suspicious. There hasn’t been a murder. So, it’s trying not to give too much away in that first episode, I think, was some of the challenges, but overall, it was such a fun project to explore with the landscape and the setting of the show, but also so many different elements, like horror, thriller, mystery, but also comedy. It was a lot of fun.
Awesome. This is my last question; do you have any upcoming projects for film or TV, or anything that you are excited about, or that you can talk about, that we can look forward to?
Yeah, well, firstly, just to say that the score for “Nine Bodies“ is now out on Spotify and wherever else you get your music, and I’m excited as well that it’s gonna be coming out on the BBC because it’s only had a US release so far. It’s going to be out on the BBC later in the year. I’ve got, very soon, a film coming out called “The Salt Path,“ which I’m really excited for. I think it’s the 30th of May because it’s a film I’ve been waiting for a long time. I finished it last January, so I’ve kind of been waiting for it to come out for a very long time. It premiered in Toronto, but now it’s going to have its full release, and it stars Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. So, it was a very different, really emotional, and very heartfelt score, and again, there was lots of nature in the score, but this is the English coast, so very, very different. I worked with a great solo violinist on the score for that, Ruby Colley. So yes, I’m very excited for that to come out. The soundtrack is also coming out on the 30th of May, and we’ve designed the soundtrack to be, like, one of those that you hopefully listen to the whole thing. All the tracks blend into each other as if you would put them on vinyl. Hopefully, people can have that fullexperience and enjoy the film in the cinema because it’s visually stunning and has great performances.
Then, I’ve got another film called “Bad Apples,“ which is hopefully coming out later this year, at some point, TBC. It stars Saoirse Ronan and is a brilliant kind of dark comedy. That was a lot of fun. The score is quite…I had a lot of free reign from the director, and we recorded lots of recorders, so it’s kind of got a Baroque kind of sound. We had Sarah Jeffrey, who is kind of a virtuoso recorder player, and she had a family of recorders, from the biggest to the smallest. It’s kind of an interesting score, and it’s one of those dark comedies that I think are a lot of fun. So yeah, lots of things are coming up.
That’s so exciting to hear! I’m excited to listen. I am excited for those films, and, genuinely, I’m excited to stream the soundtrack for this show on Spotify. Hopefully your works will have more clarinet in it…
Yeah! Actually, “Bad Apples“ does have lots of clarinets as well. So you can go into that.
Love it! I think you can understand, being a musician, that hearing film scores and then seeing, like the process of making it, is very exciting. So, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me!
Of course!
“Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue” is now available to stream on Prime Video
You can follow Sarah and hear more of her thoughts on the Emmys and Film on X @sarsaraaaaah
