Emmy winning composer (and our friend) Bear McCreary will have the distinction this week of having four different films currently available to audiences with Rim of the World (Netflix), The Professor and the Madman (Amazon), Godzilla, and the addition of the 2019 reboot of the classic horror franchise Child’s Play. 

Just today, a tease of the score for Child’s Play (which releases on Friday, June 14th) was released by Consequence of Sound, and you can get a better idea of what’s in store when the murderous doll of our nightmares Chucky (brought to life by Mark Hamill) in Lars Klevberg‘s film.

I had the chance to speak with Bear earlier this year about his slate of projects, and he shared an interesting factoid with me about the weirdest instrument he used- the answer TOTALLY surprised me.

[this interview has been edited for clarity and length.]

Bear: HEY!

Mab: HEY THERE Mr. Godzilla-Childs-Play-Netflix-frakking-EVERYTHING person.

Bear: Yes, the hyphens keep getting longer, don’t they? It’s a crazy month with 4 movies coming out in 4 weeks, which is cool.

Mab: No kidding, it’s a hellova stack, with some classic titles you get to sort of reinvent and put your own spin on with things like Child’s Play.

Bear: Yeah that kind of came out of nowhere, and has been just an amazing experience. The fact that it’ll be out around the same time as Godzilla is cool because they are the opposite score in every way. Godzilla is epic and soaring and operatic and MONSTEROUS, [we both laugh] and Child’s Play is like broken and quirky and weird and emotional and funny and scary and bizarre. It’s really cool to get these two franchises and reinvent them in really weird and cool ways.

Mab: What’s the weirdest thing you brought out for Child’s Play?

Bear: If you saw the promo video, you saw a bunch of weird stuff. In the first frame, you see otamatones, there’s hurdy gurdy, there’s accordion, there’s kazoos, toy pianos, and i used all of that, 99% of the score is just me in the studio playing with my weird toys. But actually the werdest sound you’ll hear in Child’s Play without a doubt is my voice.



Mab: Okay then! The fact that you consider your voice to be the weirdest?

[we both laugh] Bear: There is a VERY featured reoccuring vocal component that people worked on the film were like ‘What, what is THAT?’ and its me. [we both laugh] So yeah, when you hear a choir of creepy little girls singing ‘la la la’, it’s all me.

Mab: So we can add “creepy school girl” to your list.

Bear: [laughing] Oh yeah! I had to renew my SAG because that’s how much I sang on this. And it’s funny because I was going to replace it, with female singer or a child singer, I even recorded other people, but it just wasn’t as good. My mixing engineer would listen to it and go ‘but the other thing was better, use THAT’ and I’d have to admit it was MEEEE and I could use that. But sure enough, that’s where it ended up.

Mab: Ridiculous or brilliant- we can totally quote Spinal Tap here about the fine line between clever and stupid.

Bear: [laughs] YEAH I had a lot of Spinal Tap moments doing this where I thought it was so outrageous, and YET, the studio, the producers and the director all resonated with the most outrageous sounds. I would not have been anywhere near as daring with the crazy vocals, the instruments, without the input from the director who kept saying he wanted ‘more weird kid vocals, more weird thing!’ Oddly enough, I think Child’s Play is my most personal score. I mean that in almost a literal sense. The ideas are mine, the sounds are MINE, it’s my body, my hands on things, almost entirely me. It’s the score that’s the most-downloaded directly from my twisted imagination. Because there’s nobody else involved practically, which is fun. So, I either ruined the movie or made it awesome, I don’t know.

Mab: I guess we’ll find out, huh?

Bear: Yeah, we’ll see!

***

Thanks so much to Bear for his time, and all the BITCHIN’ music he’s been providing us with!

Child’s Play is set to hit theaters on Friday June 21st 2019.