Yellowjackets Composers Explain Why the Showtime Series Doesn't Sound Like Typical "Horror" (Exclusive)

By Nicole Drum

To call Season 2 of Yellowjackets memorable would be a bit of an understatement. The Showtime series was already a phenomenon soon after its debut in 2021, but the second season took things to a wild new level the story plunged into darkness as its characters engaged in cannibalism, the mysteries of the wilderness got weirder and weirder and the sins of the past continued to have major ramifications on the survivors in the present day. With all of its mysterious and often bloody elements, the series and particularly Season 2 had some strong horror vibes, but that didn't translate to every aspect of Yellowjackets. The series' music in particular had its own unique tone and feel and according to composers Anna Waronker and Craig Wedren, that is on purpose. The musicians told ComicBook.com's Nicole Drum that the music for the series needed to unsettle more than just be scary — and they took some inspiration from the Universal monster movies of the past as part of larger sonic tropes they worked with.

"We need to feel unsettled when we're making this music. If we're not feeling the way the scene needs to make the audience feel then they probably won't feel it either," Wedren said. "And our bar is pretty high because we spend all of our lives making music, so we have probably a higher threshold for that stuff. So, we know that if we're scared or unsettled or disoriented, I think disoriented is probably a better term for this score, if we are feeling disoriented, then the audience will most likely be. And so as opposed to more traditional genre shows, where you know what world you're in there, there's freedom in this to really create our own world. So, we'll grab from horror tropes, even [Universal monster movies]. We'll take from those tropes or even more modern horror tropes. So, really where it's coming from, at least personally, is more noise, psychedelic, industrial, experimental, post-punk music that I think is part of both of our DNA.

"Dissonance and finding the beauty in that and how it's so emotional," Waronker added. "And I'd say about halfway through the season, we both kind of lost touch with reality a little bit. We were immersed into it."

Waronker went onto explain that at one point in making music for Season 2, she herself felt like the "wilderness chose" her in that she started identifying with the different elements of the series and its subject matter, which connected to the music.

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"Six is where I feel like the wilderness chose me," Waronker said, referring to the episode "Qui" in which Shauna gives birth to her stillborn son in the wilderness. "I'm a mother as well, and so the subject matter, it felt really important because I identified with so many of those different psychedelic freakouts that she was having."

New episodes of Yellowjackets hit the Showtime app on Fridays and new episodes air on Showtime on Sundays.

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