It has been a couple of months since the release of Appuppan and The Boys fame Anantharaman Ajay's short Granny, a psychological thriller/horror film starring KPAC Leela and Sivaraaj in the lead roles. One of the highlights of the film is its subtly efficient use of music, which complements the eerie and atmospheric nature of the film. In a recent interview with CE, its music director Ananthakrishnan Ajay, also the director's brother, spoke about his influences for Granny, designing the score for a horror film, his favourite scene in the short, mixing the score for different devices, and more.
Excerpts:
Ajay mentioned using Bhoothakalam as a reference for the film's lighting pattern and ambience. Did you have any reference for the film's music?
No, not really. I usually try not to work with very specific musical references because I feel that can sometimes limit my own creative expression. Of course, I’m still influenced by the things I listen to regularly. Those sounds tend to sit somewhere in the back of my mind, and when I eventually get to the studio, what comes out is often a mix of all those different influences and experiences. The best moments are when I can get into a flow state and the music just comes out naturally, without having to overthink or force it.
If I had to name a few influences in the soundtrack space, I’d probably mention Angelo Badalamenti’s score for Mulholland Drive, Trent Reznor’s work on The Social Network and Quake, and Matt Uelmen’s scores for Diablo I and II.
In a horror film set inside a home, silence is often as loud as the score. How did you and Ajay decide where to let natural sound take over versus where the score needed to subtly twist the environment?
It was largely intuitive. Ajay and I both watch a lot of films and have fairly strong opinions about how silence should be used, and in this case our sensibilities were already quite aligned.
So it was less about following a fixed rule and more about communicating what each moment needed. We would discuss whether a scene was stronger when left to the natural sound of the space, or whether the score could subtly shift the mood without drawing too much attention to itself. Most of the time, we were able to arrive naturally arrive at those decisions.
In a short film, you don't have the luxury of a slow, 90-minute burn to build tension. How did you structure the music's progression so the psychological dread hits hard within a condensed runtime?
The aim of the music was always to elevate what was already happening on screen. The way the film was scripted and shot did a lot of the work in building tension at the right times, so my role was just to support it.
It came down to choosing effective chord progressions, instrumentation and sound design for the key moments, and gradually intensifying those elements as the film moved forward. Because the runtime is condensed, every musical element had to carry its weight and add to the psychological tension without taking away from the scene itself. All of this, paired with the clever use of dissonance, can make the score feel particularly haunting.
Domestic horror often blurs the line between score and sound design. Did you record everyday household sounds or creaks and process them into instruments, or did you stick entirely to traditional instrumentation?
The instrumentation was a mix of traditional instruments such as guitars and strings, and synthesizers, but even the traditional instruments were often processed in very unconventional ways using reverbs, granulators, distortion and other effects.
I also experimented with tactile techniques. For example, I would scrape the metallic head of a lighter against a guitar fretboard to create these harsh, atonal metallic sounds, then record and manipulate them further in Ableton. So even when the source is something familiar, the aim was to transform it into something that felt much more unsettling and textural.
If you had any reference or even if you didn't, it sometimes gets difficult to 'unhear' the music you have already heard. Did you have this challenge?
Not really. I think I’m much more influenced by the music I genuinely connect with than by things I don’t like. So if I’m truly inspired by something, there’s no real reason to unhear or unlearn it. If I hear something that doesn’t work for me, I usually just take note of why it doesn’t work and treat that as something to avoid.
But at the end of the day, a lot of these compositional choices aren’t made consciously. They often happen as a result of me jamming around on my guitar or synthesizers and seeing where it takes me.
Was there a specific scene or cue in Granny that genuinely creeped you out while you were composing it late at night in your studio?
Yes, definitely the final scene of Granny. The music for that sequence uses layered female ululation samples, which I stacked and processed to create the feeling of an occultist ritual.
Working on that late at night made the scene even more unsettling, because those textures started to feel quite eerie once they were built up and paired with the visuals.
Short films are often watched on laptops, phones, or festival speakers with varying audio quality. Did you mix the score differently to ensure the low-end dread translates even on basic headphones?
Yes, definitely. Nowadays, a lot of media is consumed through airpods, laptops and other low to medium quality playback devices, so that does influence certain mix decisions, especially when it comes to the bass frequencies.
A lot of these devices struggle to reproduce the really low frequencies that are crucial to creating that sense of dread and atmosphere. One way around that is to generate additional harmonics that mimic what the bass is doing higher up in the frequency spectrum. Those harmonics can cut through on smaller speakers, so even if you’re not physically hearing the deepest bass frequencies, you still perceive their presence and impact.