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Mark Smythe, 1972-2026
Composer Mark Smythe died on May 9, 2026, after suffering a heart attack while hiking with friends on Mount Wilson near Los Angeles, California. He was 53 years old.
Mark Cyprian Ward Smythe was born in Nelson, New Zealand, in October 1972. He was a chorister at Nelson Cathedral, played violin and clarinet in the Nelson Symphony Orchestra, and performed in several rock bands on New Zealand’s South Island before pursuing a career in screen composition. Smythe moved to Australia in 2004, where he completed his MA in Screen Music at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. He eventually relocated to Los Angeles in 2013 to further his career as a film composer.
He received SCL Award and World Soundtrack Award nominations for his score to the shark thriller “The Reef: Stalked” (2022) — helped by his innovative “Vote Mark, Vote Shark!” campaign. His other notable works included the horror films “Daddy’s Little Girl” (2012), “Charlie’s Farm” (2015), “Boar” (2017), and “The Possessed” (2021), as well as the war drama “Unfallen” (2017) and the romantic comedy “Love You Like That” (2021).
In addition to his film work, Smythe was also a composer of concert and choral music. His most notable classical works included the orchestral suite “Flying South,” adapted from his score for a Natural History New Zealand documentary and conducted by Smythe in Bulgaria in 2017, and “Song of the Sea,” a work for choir and electric guitar that premiered at the 2024 Choral Arts Initiative Project Festival in Los Angeles. He collaborated with the LA Choral Lab on several projects and also produced new music for strings and electric guitar at The Night Temple. Read more…
Under-the-Radar Round Up 2022, Part 4
Original Reviews by Jonathan Broxton
My recurring under-the-radar series usually concentrates on the best scores for non-English language films in a given year, but doing so means that I sometimes overlook music written for British and American films that are similarly low-profile, but also have outstanding scores. To rectify that, here is the first of two new review articles looking at five such scores from the first half of 2022, written for independent English-language features that you might have otherwise overlooked. The scores are from a beautiful animated film about a German painter, a comedy horror film about a cursed board game, a modern day Indiana Jones variant, a powerful period drama set in the Scottish highlands, and a shark-infested horror thriller from Australia!
Under-the-Radar Round Up 2019, Part 2
Original Reviews by Jonathan Broxton
As I have done for the past several years, I am pleased to present the second installment in my ongoing series of articles looking at the best “under the radar” scores from around the world. Rather than grouping the scores on a geographical basis, this year I decided to again simply present the scores in a random order, and so this second batch includes reviews of five more disparate scores from the first six months of the year – including a German apocalyptic drama, an Australian horror movie, a Spanish animated film about a surrealist filmmaker, a French drama about religion and pig farming, and a sweeping romance set in the German film industry in the 1960s!
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