Morricone Youth Rescore “NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD”

SBCAST & KCSB-FM Present Halloween-Themed Event: Morricone Youth’s Live Re-Score of Cult Classic Film Night of the Living Dead

NYC band performs live while the critically-acclaimed horror masterpiece is projected on a giant outdoor screen 

“They’re coming to get you, Santa Barbara.”

On Saturday, October 26th, local film and music fans are invited to (re)experience the low budget horror classic Night of the Living Dead with an original soundtrack performed live by the independent rock band Morricone Youth. The multidimensional event will be hosted at the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science & Technology (SBCAST), at 513 Garden Street, in connection with KCSB-FM 91.9.

Just in time for a weekend full of Halloween-themed festivities, the gate at SBCAST will open at 6pm and showtime is 7pm. Attendees are welcome to come in costumes or to dress in the “holiday spirit.” Food options will be available for purchase, as will special non-alcoholic elixirs.

Six years ago, Morricone Youth — a collective of New York City musicians founded by composer Devon Goldberg in 1999, known for reinterpreting 100+ film & television works worldwide — made a buzzworthy local debut at SBCAST. That event, in the summer of 2018, brought out over 200 attendees for a night of live music underscoring the influential, independently-made, allegorical film, which was released in 1968. The band returns to Santa Barbara to reprise their live re-score of George A. Romero’s feature cinematic breakthrough.

25 years ago, Night of the Living Dead was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It reflects the turbulence of a nation rocked by changing cultural mores, an unpopular war in Vietnam, fear of nuclear war, the assassinations of important political leaders, and outbursts of racist violence that have plagued the U.S. for generations. The film’s lead, Duane Jones, one of the first African-American actors to star in a successful genre film of this type, became something of an icon for this role (and for a surreal 1973 cult vampire film, Ganja & Hess).

Due to a clerical error during the title credits, Night immediately slipped into the public domain, so it has been subject to numerous revisions (colorization, remakes, unofficial adaptations, “bootleg” video releases, even animation, etc.). Morricone Youth’s reimagining of the film, however, is one of the boldest ever. This live re-score will again take place outdoors in the courtyard of event-host SBCAST, which features a 25-foot screen.

New Jersey radio station WFMU-FM (which airs “Morricone Island,” a weekly film and TV soundtrack program hosted by Goldberg using a radio name, “Devon E. Levins”), describes Night in this way: “The film Readers Digest warned would inspire cannibalism and ground zero for the modern zombie fan, Romero’s feature-length debut laid the groundwork for the indie horror film and zombie craze to follow. The first of five in Romero’s Living Dead series, no other film about the lumbering, flesh-eating undead is as genuinely scary as the black-and-white original in which a group of terrified strangers hole up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse as legions of hungry zombies move ever closer.” (WFMU 2023) Night is also recognized as the first of the modern “zombie” films that disassociate such monsters from Voodoo and other related cultural references (in such a way that the reanimated undead characters are called “ghouls,” and never referred to as zombies).

“‘The actual original sound is up for a majority of the film,’” Goldberg tells Whatzup, an arts and entertainment website. “‘We’re often blending with that and/or there’s times when the original underscore is muted, so we’re kind of taking over. Those… tend to be in the action sequences, so there’s not a lot of dialogue anyways.’” Romero’s Night uses “‘licensed music… library production music….[not] created for the film itself. It was repurposed from other sources. (Subsequent films) Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)… are favorites of ours, too, but they had proper composers and/or a band scoring for it — in the case of Goblin doing Dawn… We…took it on in that tradition” (Whatzup, 2023). Morricone Youth’s horror-film scoring evokes a retro, modular-synth musical style popularized in ’70s-80s films by the likes of Goblin and John Carpenter.

Co-presented by KCSB-FM 91.9, Santa Barbara’s only community-radio station (which led the first Morricone Youth event in Santa Barbara), this screening / performance is also sponsored by UCSB’s Associated Students Program Board. 

Advance tickets: $20 + $3 Eventbrite fees. Venmo-only at the door, with a discounted student rate of $15 with current UCSB ID. Low backed chairs or cushions only, please, to respect others’ views. Dress warmly and consider bringing throws or blankets. For more info: kcsb.org or sbcast.org.