High School Marching Band Performed ‘Saw’ Theme During Chicago Thanksgiving Day Parade

The Saw series launched in 2004 and, compared to many other horror franchises that have launched in the last two decades, delivered audiences not only a memorable film but also a recognizable theme song. During last week’s Thanksgiving Day parade in Chicago, Illinois, one high school marching band concluded their performance with their rendition of the theme, also known as “Hello Zepp” by Charlie Clouser. You can see a clip of the performance below.

The Ocoee Marching Knights from Ocoee High School in Florida briefly played the song, as it is one of many songs the band is quite familiar with. Band director at Ocoee High Bernie Hendricks previously revealed that, while the show might be holiday oriented, he felt it was too early to bust out the holiday songs.

“We’re taking some stuff out of our show from this year, which was like a party-theme show,” Hendricks shared with the Orange Observer. “We’re not doing any Christmas music, because it’s not quite Christmas yet. We’re not actually learning anything brand new, but we’re taking some of the stuff (we have), cutting and splicing it and putting it together as we create about 20 to 30 minutes worth of nonstop music, because that’s about the length of the actual parade. It’s not really long, but we want to make sure that we look and sound good.”

While the theme song might be recognizable in the horror community, it is technically rearranged with each film in the Saw series, as it is often heard in a film’s final reveal. Clouser previously detailed his inspiration for the now-iconic theme.

“I kind of had a game plan going in that I discussed a lot with [director] James Wan and [writer] Leigh Whannell, that we thought it would add extra impact to that twist ending, and the sort of thing that’s become a sort of trademark in a lot of the Saw movies, the ending reveal montage where there’s a lot of quick cuts and flashbacks to earlier scenes in the movie while Jigsaw‘s voice narrates and explains the parts you may not have seen earlier in the film,” the composer revealed to Nightmare on Film Street. “So it was kind of on purpose that the whole main body of the movie had a score that was just very murky and indistinct and kind of blurry and didn’t really state musical ideas, thematic ideas strongly at all.”

He added, “I knew that in order for that piece of music to work it would have to be fairly simple and kind of repetitive and hypnotic and not have a lot of musical information in there but still kind of start small-ish and then build as the insistent phrases kind of repeat. So once I had that game plan sort of in my mind, the creation of that ‘Hello Zepp’ theme wasn’t something that took days, it really kind of came together kind of quickly because I had already established these kind of mental rules and conditions that it had to fulfill. I did most of the music in a few hours one day, spent the evening arranging it for a string quartet, the next day recorded a string quartet, and boom it was done.”

The most recent film in the franchise, Jigsaw, debuted last year, with no official details for a follow-up film having been confirmed.

Would you be surprised if a marching band started performing the creepy song during a parade? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!