20th Century Studios’ new movie Darby and the Dead, directed by Silas Howard and scored by Roger Neill, is streaming now on Hulu in the United States and will be coming soon to Disney+ in many other countries. The supernatural teen comedy is about a high school student who moonlights as a spiritual messenger. After suffering a near-death experience as a young girl, Darby Harper gains the ability to see dead people and as a result, becomes introverted and shut off from her high school peers and prefers to spend time counseling lonely spirits who have unfinished business on earth.
Roger discussed his creative process with Disney Plus Informer, and said one of his favorite parts of composing the film were the scenes between Darby and her “frenemy” Capri: “the scenes between those two characters are kind of magical, and there’s lots of sort of supernatural stuff that happened. So, that was really fun to score and trying to find interesting colors to accent and accentuate the action between them. That was fun. The challenging part would ultimately be, even though we have ghosts, it really is in some ways more about just high school pressures and high school relationships than it is about anything supernatural. So, that was fun but there were a number of key scenes and key storylines involving emotional relationships between characters and that in some ways was the bigger challenge.”
Click here to read Roger’s full Disney Plus Informer interview
Click here to watch Roger’s Allow Me To Introduce interview with Michael Zimmerman