Hannah Peel’s soundtrack to the film Saccharine released digitally on Real World X.
Following the recent release of Hannah Peel and Beibei Wang’s critically acclaimed debut album collaboration ‘The Endless Dance’, Hannah Peel returns with her latest soundtrack work, this time for the ‘body horror’ movie Saccharine.
Saccharine is written and directed by Natalie Erika James whose previous films include Relic (2020) and Apartment 7A (2024).
In Saccharine a lovelorn medical student becomes terrorised by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight-loss craze. The four-star review in The Guardian newspaper says: “Into that Venn diagram overlay between ‘body horror’ and ‘Australian’ comes Saccharine, the new film from writer-director Natalie Erika James, which takes a bold route into exploring eating disorders and body dysmorphia, demonstrating yet again the great power and malleability of horror movies as vessels for cultural commentary.”
A recent article in Crack Magazine, entitled ‘Age of dread: How modern horror became a proving ground for experimental sound’, explores how horror cinema encourages composers to play more freely than almost any other genre and suggests that musicians are responding more to ideas of tension and suspense than to traditions of film composition – whether orchestral or electronic.
In the article Hannah Peel says; “I’m really interested in any sounds that feel visceral, that feel like they are in your everyday, but are completely unpredictable. I remember telling a commercial TV producer when first starting out that I would be sampling this creaky door that sounded like the growls of a pig for a beat. It wasn’t met with much enthusiasm, even though I knew it would sound amazing! In horror, it’s different. That sort of creative play is welcomed.”
