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In Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, a sun-soaked Aussie backdrop turns into an aquatic nightmare as Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a nomadic surfer, becomes prey to a shark-obsessed serial killer named Tucker (Jai Courtney) who hides in plain sight. As Josh Korngut’s review out of Cannes so aptly puts it, “Dangerous Animals delivers one of horror’s greatest villains in years,” evoking all the dread of Jaws while carving out its own niche of terror. Behind every thrilling moment lies an equally nuanced score—one that must shift seamlessly between the razor-sharp tension of predator and prey and the undercurrents of attachment and desperation that drive the film’s characters.
For this score to hit the mark, Byrne needed a composer who could live and breathe those emotional beats. Fellow Australian Michael Yezerski—whose partnership with Byrne began on The Devil’s Candy—was tasked with forging a sonic language as deliberate as the film itself. With a résumé that includes wide-ranging projects like The Vigil, Blindspotting, The Deb, and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, Yezerski’s thoughtful and reflexive approach to scoring was a natural fit for the world Byrne would soon create. Here, Yezerski’s score doesn’t just punctuate the action; it reveals the beating heart beneath the surface.
Dread Central recently spoke with Yezerski about reuniting with Byrne after a decade, crafting character-driven motifs, and the nuts and bolts of composing such a sharp score. Read on as he reveals how he balanced horror tropes with heartfelt undercurrents to bring Dangerous Animals’ unique blend of terror and empathy to life.
Dread Central: It’s been a minute since you’ve worked with Sean Byrne. What was it like reconnecting and working together again after all these years?
Michael Yezerski: It was like getting back together with an old friend and just hanging out. I’ve known Sean, oh God, I’m gonna show my age, but it’s been 25 years. But we didn’t work together until 10 years ago on The Devil’s Candy. And the funny thing about The Devil’s Candy was we only worked together on it for about, let’s say, 11 days or something like that.
I came in right at the end. I think they were trying to make their TIFF premiere, and they just needed the music written really quickly. And I was able to do that. A partnership was born at that point. So when Sean called me almost a year and a half ago and said, “Hey, I’ve got this film. It’s up, and I’d love you to be the composer.” He was also very polite and added, “…if you’re available.” I said, ‘I am 100% there for anything you do.’
The interesting thing about this film is that the score was not written in 11 days. We had quite a long time. I think it was probably written in about seven months, and I started sketching pretty early on. In early parts of the edit, they tried some ideas; some of them stuck, some didn’t. And then the actual scoring process just kept pushing out because of test screenings and other things that they were doing, such as waiting for visual effects to come in. So, we had lots of time to keep going back, improving, and making changes. Sean had a lot of time to get to know the score and really helped me shape the score. So, it was a pretty granular process that lasted a long time.
DC: I would have to imagine that having that length of time to work fostered a different working dynamic, considering the experience with The Devil’s Candy was so different. What was it like figuring out how to work together in this way with that added luxury of time?
MY: That’s right. And the thing is, it allowed us to have a much deeper conversation about music, music in film, and music in this film, in particular. When I started, and I guess all composers do this, you lean on your horror tropes. And Sean, to his credit, was saying, “I understand that it sounds like horror, but I don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing here.” So that actually forced us to evaluate.
See, I guess what happened is with The Devil’s Candy, because we were moving so fast, I started on the final reel. The way I shaped that score was that the biggest cues of the film were at the end. And they are in this film, too. So I thought that would be a fantastic way to go because it allows us to see where the music is gonna get to. And so, I started writing the end of this film first. But Sean said, “I need to hear the source elements before you get to the big stuff.”
I think for him, this film was much more about a character journey. So we put all of that music aside, went back to reel one, and started coming up with character themes and emotional things like, “This is the anxiety sound. This is the sound of terror. This is the sound of optimism. This is the sound of triumph.” And it might not even be a musical theme; it might just be a sound. So, from that language, he was able to say, “Okay. I want the anxiety sound here.” Or, “I want the terror sound here as Tucker walks in.” We were able to develop a language, and we just kept refining it.
DC: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Especially for one particular scene (no spoilers here), where it felt very consciously scored as more emotional and empowering versus horrific, which it so easily could have been. Was that a mutual decision you made with Sean? How did you approach that big moment?
MY: Exactly. What you’re talking about is probably the scene that… It’s not that we disagreed about it. It’s just that it took me a while to actually understand what Sean wanted in that scene. And then once I got it, I’m like, “Oh. This kind of explains the whole movie.”
I think for Sean, this movie is a love story. Or at least it has a love story within it. And the thing is, the character who does the horrific thing is motivated by love, but you wouldn’t know that just by looking at the images. You see it in their eyes, but the music is there to enhance your interpretation of that. And yeah, my initial reaction was to, of course, score it in an absolutely mind-bendingly horrific way to make the audience viscerally feel what [they’re] doing. And Sean’s response was, “No. [They’re] doing this out of love.”
DC: This whole movie plays with expectations in such a fun way. For example, sharks are a big part of this movie, but at the same time, it’s not necessarily a shark movie. I would imagine Australia has a unique relationship with sharks due to sheer proximity. Considering you and Sean are both from Australia, how did that influence how the sharks were presented and scored in this film?
MY: I think it’s also worth noting here that the movie was originally written to be in Florida. But when Sean got hold of it, he was like, “No, this is the Gold Coast of Australia.” And he wanted to do exactly what you said about bringing in the Australian notion of sharks. I’m not a surfer, but growing up in Australia, they used to be something that surfers would worry about. We occasionally would get shark alerts on our beaches, but not very often. Then they put in all the netting and stuff to stop it from happening. But sharks were always out there.
I think sharks were only a threat of sorts because of Jaws, because of the movie. They were seen as a threat. The big fear of sharks was that a Jaws-like monster would come in and attack people at the beach, but that was never the Australian reality. They would generally attack surfers and still do, but I think Sean’s motivations for making this movie were that the sharks are not the bad guys. They’re just hungry. Or they make a mistake.
That’s obviously a message of the film. They even said it at the Q&A at the premiere last week—they wanted to make a movie where sharks get a better rap on screen after years of being the tormenting bad guy.
From a musical point of view, there is a theme for the sharks, but it’s not from the sharks’ perspective. It’s the human perspective of terror, and it’s basically a scream; the orchestra screams. You hear it’s six notes, but it’s never played from the sharks’ point of view as if the sharks are hunting. It’s always played from the human’s point of view, who are being fed to them.
DC: So, you mentioned Jaws, and I feel like we need to address this great white shark in the room. There are obviously a lot of iconic horror scores, but it just so happens that one of the most influential and iconic horror scores happens to be for a shark movie, and it’s John Williams, nonetheless. Did the Jaws sonic legacy factor into your approach at all, or was it discussed? Did it cross your mind to lean into the reference or deliberately lean away?
MY: Yes, of course. This is obviously not the first shark movie since Jaws, and not many have really referenced the Jaws score. I think it’s just too iconic. To really approach it in any way, shape, or form is not the type of thing that I would want to do as a composer. It was on our radar only inasmuch as we were creating something new and something different. And I think the way that we did it was to focus on story. In our minds, this was a human story and not a shark story, even though the sharks are everywhere.
There are two moments in the film where the sharks get their own piece of music. And it does it in a sort of, I’m gonna say, like a National Geographic, appraising way. It celebrates the sharks at these two moments, towards the beginning and the end of the film. And again, not giving anything away, but the rest of the time, the score is definitely really from the point of view of the victims.
Tucker has a theme, which is a sort of grinding, synth-based, gliss-slide thing. But, it’s almost more reflective of the way that Zephyr, Moses, and Heather, to an extent, feel about him rather than his point of view. We were trying to approach the score as something original because these characters are original. We hadn’t seen characters like them on the screen before, or at least, I hadn’t. And it was very much, I think, in Sean’s mind about, “Where are they at every point in the film? Where are they in their journey individually?”
Every single note of this score means something. And again, it’s just from working on it for that long. Nothing has gotten by accidentally, or unintentionally, or like, “Oops! That made it into the film.” That sometimes happens when you’re working really fast. It could be a happy accident that something works or whatever. That’s not the case with this. Every note of this score is very deliberate.
DC: Following that train of thought, there is a thrilling, shifting, predator versus prey dynamic throughout the film, which the music and sound design chart extremely effectively. Did you work directly with the sound or editing team at all to really lock this element of the film in and ensure those emotional beats hit in all the right spots?
MY: Yeah, Dave White, the sound designer, sent me his sound effects early on. Not the final ones, but a really good approximation of what they were going to be. So, I was able to work and prepare for an early temp screening we had in Long Beach. It was actually during the L.A. fires, so it was this year. Preparing for that temp screening, because I was able to get a lot of the sound from Dave, it made it a lot easier.
The last two months of scoring this film were the most intense. But that’s also when I had the most complete picture of what the sound effects were going to be, what the visual effects were looking like, etc., so I was able to make those final color changes, knowing where everything was going to hit.
But in terms of the overall picture, that’s Sean. He’s in control of everything. And he’s a bit of a genius, our Sean. He knows what he wants at every single point. So when he is having conversations with you, he’s also thinking about the color, the sound, the dialogue, the foley, and everything that’s gonna go above the score or behind it. He’s making determinations and pointing out things that I wouldn’t necessarily see, hear, or think of.
DC: Along these same lines, this film doesn’t waste a lot of time and is well-paced. From the first moment we meet Tucker to the last minute where we leave him, this movie really cooks. Were there any challenges in determining “where to build” versus “when to hold back” to keep that breakneck pace up? If so, how did you overcome these challenges?
MY: Yeah, absolutely. And Sean said that at 93 minutes, this is his longest-ever film. [Laughs] His trademark is that he likes to hit that 90 minutes. He likes things to move, in terms of pacing. Early on, we spent a lot of time on reel one finding those themes, and I was making some of the moments very big and very energetic. Sean pulled me back, saying, “We’re only in reel one. We’ve got a long way to go.”
That started to plant the seed in my head that this really is a journey. I started calibrating everything to, “What’s reel five going to sound like?” We are going to get bigger and bigger, but there’s a point, and I have to leave room because the last reel is just gonna go absolutely crazy. Without that shape, the film would make less sense. The music is definitely taking quite a narrative role, even just expressing a quickening heartbeat or a slight lull in the tension, where we just back off for a second. A string comes in, and there’s a moment of connection. You’re then allowed to breathe for a second before the door opens, and there’s mayhem.
DC: Zephyr is such a fascinating, complicated character. She feels authentic in the way she’s a fighter, but she doesn’t ever cross over into superhero territory. How did you approach her sound and instrumentation? Was there anything particular about her that inspired you in creating the sonic background for her?
MY: The scene that we wrote her theme to was when she was driving. It’s the first sort of emotional moment when she’s driving away from Moses’ house in the early morning. And I did a few versions of that theme. But I think the one that stuck was actually the simplest.
Sean was looking for something that audiences would hum going out of the theater. The melody had to be very simple, and the one that ends up in the film has a little step-down motion. It’s a little bit sad. It’s heading downwards, but with the right orchestration, you could make it huge and triumphant. I also gave him a version that stepped up. He loved both, but it was a little bit more positive, and I think the one that stuck revealed a sort of sadness and vulnerability about the character.
Once we had that set in stone, we were able to use Zephyr’s theme throughout. Even if it was just in conversation with the scene, way off in the background. She might be having a conversation with Tucker, and you might hear a hint of it. In the intention of the score, she’s gained a little bit of power. Just a little bit. And then you might hear a little bit of Tucker’s grinding thing pushing back. And then it’s, no, she’s lost it. So there was the interplay between the two characters is reflected in the score.
DC: I have to imagine Tucker was fun to score. Jai Courtney’s performance is incredibly fun to watch, but equally terrifying.
MY: It’s fun, but you always have to be careful of the comedic bits, as well. Like when he’s riffing and trying to be charismatic and all this with the girls, you need to back off, in a way, musically, to allow the performance. Thankfully, Jai is incredible, and less is more. And then I’d lean into the sort of maniacal stuff.
To me, I wasn’t scoring him as much as I was scoring the girl’s reaction to him. So, the craziness in my mind was always about Zephyr’s point of view, less so from Tucker’s, because I didn’t think we needed to. Sean might disagree that we didn’t need to understand him as much as we needed to understand the girls, but it’s because it’s all there.
DC: There is a very primal nature about him, right? In fact, there’s a line where he even says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Don’t think with your brains, think with your guts.” As a composer, where so much of what you do shapes the emotional undercurrent of a film, does that idea resonate with you? Here, we are picking apart how you created this score, but I would imagine there are times when it makes more sense to let the gut override the brain.
MY: Oh, absolutely. The thing is, I tend to find that usually, my first instinct is right. I don’t know why. If I watch a piece of footage, or even if I’m just seeing it, whatever I write first tends to feel more correct to me in the long term rather than honing in on the “right” or the “perfect” idea. It doesn’t always work out that way, though, because obviously, everyone has different tastes, and music is subjective.
I think in this case, though, because the score was so considered, I would go away and fly by instinct a little bit and come up with ideas and things. Once I did that, we needed to have conversations about why. What does the sound mean? What is the dramatic purpose of this and that?
So, in a way, it’s a less improvisational score than I have done in the past, where I play it, and it feels really good, and then it’s done. That’s not really the case with this one. It was, “Okay. Here’s a version. Now, let’s break it apart.” I know that it sounds like it may have been a difficult process, but it wasn’t.
Sean was in Sydney and Tasmania at different times, so every time he would send notes or ideas, we had these wild all-night Zooms. And when he would give me feedback, I would think about it, and I was like, “You know what? This is actually better.” It was subtle, and not that we were filling it with a kind of Mickey Mouse-ing thing. It was just these subtle strings groaning, or some kind of metal scrape, or something subliminal that would make the scene just subtly more terrifying or more intense. He was making the score better by tapping into things that I didn’t even see.
Distributed by IFC Films and Shudder, Dangerous Animals is playing in theaters now. You can also stream Yezerski’s music for the film now via Range Music, available on all major streaming platforms.
Categorized:Interviews