SHAUN OF THE DEAD and Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, ‘You’re My Best Friend’

Edgar Wright is one of the cleverest directors today for putting music to film, and it’s a pair of Queen songs that tie together his 2004 masterpiece Shaun of the Dead. It’s a rare coming-of-age-at-29 story, and Wright and fellow screenwriter Simon Pegg tell the tale of Shaun, a young man who's stuck in a...

IT and XTC’s “Dear God”

When you’re a kid, parents are like God. And awful parents are like Old Testament God: loyalty above morality. It’s my way or the highway (to hell). Andy Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s It strikes this note, and it knows when to use the right music to set the tone. And though the tone...

HALLOWEEN II and The Chordettes’ ‘Mr. Sandman’

The first film was a nightmare but the sequels were just a dream. The Halloween franchise has inextricably been linked to music. So much so that the John Carpenter score is synonymous with the date on the calendar. It’s haunting and timeless. Scary and real. The first experience watching the original Halloween (1978) is visceral....

FINAL DESTINATION and John Denver’s ‘Rocky Mountain High’

Horror movies make the mundane mortifying, and the same goes for horror soundtracks. How many times have you heard a child’s twinkling music box help build tension in a scary bedroom scene? A song typically known to soothe instead warns of impending death. Its syrupy tones and lightheartedness are undermined and rebranded. Think about how...

ANNIHILATION and Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s ‘Helplessly Hoping’

Pop songs in film, if chosen well, can become inseparable in meaning from a film’s text. One of the ways selecting a song can be tricky is when the song comes with layers of historical or socio-cultural significance already baked into it. A song could evoke the artist’s personality or a historical event to which...

THE MATRIX and Massive Attack’s ‘Dissolved Girl’, Rob Zombie’s ‘Dragula’, & The Prodigy’s ‘Mindfield’

To this day, that opening scene in THE MATRIX is an all-timer. The bullet-time camera freezing Trinity in the air (one year before the airborne CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON). Her unnatural launching up a wall before killing a room of policemen. Leaping across the street on rooftops. All leaving us with one thought: That must...

SCREAM franchise and Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’

"A good song has the ability to continue to reveal itself to you long after you've actually written it. This one's pretty good [for that]." - Nick Cave to Q Magazine in 2007. Like a permanent resident of the Overlook Hotel, a good song in a horror film can make it seem as if it's...

VANILLA SKY & Radiohead’s ‘Everything in its Right Place’

When I was younger, I sought out movies but music would find me. I was a Matrix kid. My head throbbed walking out of Toronto's Rainbow Market Square theatre in 1999. It was instantly my favourite movie, and at 13, I was too young and ill-equipped to know why. It was a rare moment when...

THE GAME & Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’

Using Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" in film and television is usually a crutch. You can forgive its use in Platoon or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but watching those scenes now, it feels cliché. Then it becomes self-aware-cliché when you see it in after-school sitcom Blossom or Netflix's Stranger Things. "White Rabbit" is shorthand...

SUDDEN DEATH & the NHL on ESPN theme song

Hockey on film has a surprisingly good record with pop music. Slap Shot has Maxine Nightingale’s “Right back where we started”, Goon has Sloan’s “Money City Maniacs”, Youngblood has The Supremes’ “Get Ready”, while D2: The Mighty Ducks has “Whoomp! There it is”. But 1995’s Sudden Death has virtually nothing to speak of on its...