Purdue University Fort Wayne has planned an event that horror movie fans are going to want to eat up.

On Thursday, Oct. 5, in Room 101 at Neff Hall, Morricone Youth will supply their own music during a screening of George A. Romero’s classic 1968 zombie film, Night of the Living Dead.

“The actual original sound is up for a majority of the film,” Morricone Youth founder and guitarist Devon E. Levins told Whatzup during a phone conversation from California. “We’re often blending with that and/or there’s times when the original underscore is muted, so we’re kind of taking over. Those times tend to be in the action sequences, so there’s not a lot of dialogue anyways.”

Getting their start

Formed in New York City in 1999, the members of Morricone Youth weren’t planning on the group taking off. 

“It was sort of just a side band, as a lot of us were in other projects,” Levins said. “We were sort of just a party band, where we would interpret old film music that we loved, primarily from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, sometimes ’80s. 

“That band started getting better gigs than our other main bands. It had a concept, and one thing leads to another. We were asked to score silent films at (Brooklyn Academy of Music) or places like that. We started going more in that direction over the years.”

Levins said they began being fixtures at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema, where they would supply the music to silent films.

“That led to midnight movies, where we would rewrite or reinterpret the original music in some sort of way,” he said. “That’s led to doing 15 different ones over the years.”

Running up the score

Among the other films Morricone Youth, which includes John Castro (bass), Dan Kessler (keyboards), Brian Kantor (drums), and Sami Stevens (vocals), have done are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Mad Max, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Danger: Diabolik. They also wrote the score for their own imaginary film, Silenzio Violento, and Levins composed an original score for the 2019 film The Last Porno Show.

“The most popular ones that tend to get the people out are Night of the Living Dead, the original Mad Max, and people seem to love Fantastic Planet, which is a ’70s animated cult favorite … pretty psychedelic French/Czech movie,” Levins said.

“All of them are films we love,” he added.

’Tis the season

For Night of the Living Dead, the film was done on such a tight budget that Romero didn’t have the luxury to hire someone to score it.

“Night of the Living Dead is a film (in which) he used licensed music, what they call library production music,” Levins said. “It wasn’t created for the film itself. It was repurposed from other sources. 

“(Subsequent films) Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), those are favorites of ours, too, but they had proper composers and/or a band scoring for it — in the case of Goblin doing Dawn of the Dead. We kind of took it on in that tradition. For whatever reason, that’s the one people want us to do more often than not.”

Morricone Youth’s Night of the Living Dead music is available on streaming services, featuring “Driveway to the Cemetery,” “Barbra,” “Traumatized,” “At the Gravesite,” “Beat ’Em or Burn ’Em,” and “Another One for the Fire.”

“A lot of this was speculation. Like, ‘Well, maybe if we do this, it will help drive the story in a different way, or a faster-paced way,’ ” Levins said. “We’ve given it a more rock feel.”

Performed as an accompaniment, moviegoers will still get their favorite lines like, “They’re coming to get you, Barbra” and “Are they slow-moving, chief? Yeah, they’re dead. They’re all messed up.” But this production will add a little more punch, which seems to be pretty popular this time of year.

“It’s almost as if we can’t not book it this time of year,” Levins said as we approach the spooky season. “Everybody seems to want it.”