MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

It’s not often than I feel compelled to write about the music for low-budget straight-to-streaming horror movies because, frankly, they are not usually very good. More often than not they are little more than basic string and keyboard textures punctuated with stingers and musical jump-scares. Unsophisticated, disappointing, just barely functional, with very little to recommend and even less to like out of context. They are often the domain of young up-and-coming composers still finding their feet, and although many of today’s top film music names cut their teeth in the genre, there remain dozens and dozens of others toiling away down there, writing music that nobody hears for films that few people see. Applewood is different. It’s certainly a low-profile and low-budget film, but what it lacks in prestige it more than makes up for in terms of talent and impact.

The film, which sometimes uses the subtitle ‘House of Secrets,’ is directed by Robert Hollocks and stars Kate Dailey, Susan Willis, and Nathan Rothwell. The film’s online summary describes the plot as follows: “after the sudden death of her husband, Kaitlynn Harris continues with their dream of renovating Applewood, a rambling old Georgia Mansion. Struggling against depression and her domineering mother, Kaitlynn begins to have ‘episodes’ – flashbacks to a previous era, connecting her to the mysterious disappearance of 15-year old Lucy Applewood. As Kaitlynn becomes entwined with the disturbing history of the house and the people who inhabited it, the line between her reality and her ‘episodes’ becomes increasingly blurred, causing her and others around her to question her mental health.”

The film was apparently shot and shown at some film festivals way back in the fall of 2022, but it has taken this long to receive a wider release, finally premiering on video-on-demand services back in March. And, usually, that would be that, except for the fact that the score is by composer Penka Kouneva, and it’s excellent. Kouneva, for those who don’t know, is a Bulgarian composer, born in Sofia in 1967. After studying at the Bulgarian National Academy of Music she moved to the United States in 1990, eventually completing her PhD at Duke University in 1997. She moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter, and has since worked on numerous film and video game projects as a composer, conductor, and orchestrator. She has worked extensively for composers like Steve Jablonsky, Hans Zimmer, Nathan Barr, Atli Örvarsson, and Mark Mancina on more than 100 titles, notably orchestrating three Transformers films, plus other box office hits such as Hostel, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Angels and Demons, Ender’s Game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, and Moana 2, among many others.

As a composer in her own right she has scored several sci-fi and horror movies, as well as video games like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. She has released two orchestral concept albums – A Warrior’s Odyssey in 2012 and The Woman Astronaut in 2015 – and then in 2022 Kouneva was one of the six female composers who won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Compendium for the album ‘Women Warriors – The Voices of Change’. All this is to underline that Kouneva has a ton of pedigree, and a ton of talent, and clearly should be scoring films with much higher profiles than she is being offered right now.

Kouneva co-wrote Applewood with Turkish composer Deniz Aktaş, and together they have crafted a score which drips with Gothic melodrama and moody atmosphere, is underpinned with a sense of dark romance, and which sometimes emerges into sequences of creepy tension and chilling horror. The score was recorded in Moscow with the Bow Tie Orchestra and conductor Vladimir Podgoretsky, augmented by the super high quality samples that Kouneva has got plugged into her DAW to beef up the sound. Kouneva herself says that the score was inspired by the lush, expressive style of Philippe Sarde’s Ghost Story, and you can really hear that in the finished product.

The “Main Title” theme is a knockout, a lyrical piece that emerges from a bed of dark strings and a prominent harp to become a quite sweeping orchestral melody full of gorgeous, melancholic beauty. This extends to several other cues of note which emphasize Kouneva’s more musically poetic side, including the pretty fluttering woodwinds in “Lucy and Patricia,” the more introspective pianos and electronic textures in “Kaitlynn,” the delicate lullaby warmth of “Are We Dreaming,” and the creepy-beautiful writing for strings and pianos in cues like “The Mansion” and “The Antique Store,” both of which have more than a hint of classic Christopher Young about them.

Things change in the aftermath of “An Unexpected Touch” and “It Approaches,” after which the score starts exploring much darker, scarier, angrier, more dissonant sounds as the mystery of Applewood starts to reveal itself to the unwitting Kaitlynn. Kouneva introduces a creepy new texture into the score here – whispering voices – the sound of which never fail to give me the heeby-jeebies, and she uses them in several cues thereafter to really heighten the horrific atmosphere.

Later cues like the mournfully distinguished “The House of Secrets,” “Seeing Through the Ghost,” the revelatory “A Visitor from the Past,” and the sometimes vividly aggressive and engaging “The Truth” all explore this much darker material, but something I want to clearly point out is that, throughout all this, Kouneva never loses the sense of the score’s inherent musicality. She rarely resorts to the now omnipresent and clichéd stingers and percussive slaps to make the listener jump; instead, despite being consistently sinister and sometimes quite intense, the music remains tonal and approachable throughout. She uses elegant, elongated string figures and traditionally classical stylistics to build her sense of dread, and the score is immeasurably better as a result of her doing so. Even the action music refrains from descending into banality, instead using an array of creative percussive ideas to drive the music forward.

The conclusive trio, comprising “Reunion,” “One Last Visit,” and “The Ending,” revisit the stylistics of the score’s more romantic opening sequence, and the whole thing comes to a head with a statement of the Applewood main theme to bring the score to a satisfying close.

It used to be that a large number of horror movies – especially ghost stories – would be scored with thematic content and orchestral lyricism, as opposed to the crash-bang-wallop grating and groaning that often accompanies more mainstream genre films these days. Had this score been released in the 1980s or 90s it would likely have been one of many scores of this type in a given year, and may have gotten lost in the mix. However, this is 2025, and scores like Applewood are now the exception rather than the rule, a welcome throwback to a time when horror filmmakers weren’t afraid of melody or warmth as a counterbalance to their dread and terror. As such, major kudos should go to director Robert Hollocks and his co-producers Amy Rhinehart Bailey and Sheldon Brigman for actually commissioning a score like this, and even more kudos should go to Penka Kouneva and Deniz Aktaş for having the skill and sensitivity to write it.

Buy Applewood soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Main Title (1:50)
• Lucy and Patricia (0:45)
• Kaitlynn (1:20)
• Are We Dreaming (1:02)
• The Mansion (2:10)
• The Antique Store (1:32)
• An Unexpected Touch (0:39)
• It Approaches (0:55)
• Marcus Thigpen (1:09)
• The House of Secrets (5:50)
• Seeing Through the Ghost (0:49)
• A Visitor from the Past (1:26)
• Misty Steps (1:59)
• Gothic Dining Room (1:08)
• Charles Applewood (0:51)
• The Lost Memories (1:02)
• The Truth (6:02)
• Time Is Meaningless (1:29)
• Concerned for Her Daughters (1:41)
• Reunion (1:25)
• One Last Visit (1:37)
• The Ending (1:27)

Notefornote Music (2025)

Running Time: 38 minutes 08 seconds

Music composed by Penka Kouneva. Conducted by Vladimir Podgoretsky. Orchestrations by Penka Kouneva. Additional music by Deniz Aktaş. Recorded and mixed by Gennady Papin. Edited by XXXX. Album produced by Penka Kouneva, Bryon Davis and Peter Hackman.