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In horror movies, you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie, all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated.

I've always had a fascination for everything surrounding things that are unexplainable. Not surprising that my first movie was a horror film, even though, of course, at the time I had no experience writing horror music.

For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.

For me, it's very easy to write a horror movie that's just a succession of scary sequences, but it's hard to find horror movies that have a genuine theme to them that are really exploring some aspect of our psychology and our fears.

As a kid, I had a Beatles poster and a Bela Lugosi as Dracula poster, so both worlds always appealed to me. Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts.

'A Little Nightmare Music' is the first show we created. It's about all the nightmares that can happen in the span of a concert. When things go wrong - when the lights go out or a cellphone rings - that's when an audience suddenly comes alive, wondering what's going to happen next. Things going wrong often leads to something good.

I've always been into the horror genre, so I've seen a lot of movies with ghosts and supernatural stuff.

I can't even watch horror movies - I have to turn the music down!

There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o'clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death.

Horror films are very effective to me; they have an impact on me. I think that real life things scare me a lot more.