This fall, moviegoers are going to have a whole new way to watch – and listen to – classic silent movies. Silents Synced is a new series that will pair classic albums with silent movies – and they’ll screen in theaters across the country. Deadline reports that their first offering is a pairing of two Radiohead albums with F.W. Murnau‘s 1922 German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu.

Silents Synced is the first series from Blue Starlite Entertainment, the entertainment wing of an independent drive-in theater in Austin, Texas. Blue Starlite and distributor CineLife Entertainment will offer the series to a number of independent drive-ins and indoor theaters nationwide. Josh Frank, Blue Starlite’s CEO and the creator of Silents Synced, calls it “a communal music experience like no other”, and offers it as a way to bring both movie fans and music fans out to the theater. Nosferatu will be paired with two Radiohead albums; 2000’s KID A and 2001’s Amnesiac, and is slated to premiere this fall; new pairings will be released every four months. Next on the docket is a pairing of Buster Keaton‘s silent comedy masterpiece Sherlock, Jr. with the music of R.E.M. After that, Blue Starlite is working on deals with They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, Pixies, and Amon Tobin, with more films to be named later.

What Music Plays During Silent Movies?

Before the advent of sound in film, movies were played accompanied by live music, often by an organist. Many of the scores originally composed for silent films have been lost over the intervening years, and so prints of silent films are often accompanied by public-domain soundtracks — for horror films, that usually means Johann Sebastian Bach‘s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”. Although silent films languished in obscurity for decades after they were replaced by “talkies” in the 1920s and 30s, a number of new scores have subsequently been composed for silent films as interest in the history of film grew. In 1984, legendary music producer Giorgio Moroder produced a new edit of Metropolis with an all-new score and songs by Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, and Bonnie Tyler among others; this was controversial at the time, but it did lead to a renewed interest in producing new music for silent classics. Other new scores are attempts to reconstruct the surviving original film scores.

Silents Synced won’t be your only chance to see Count Orlok on the big screen this year. Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu remake, starring Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Skarsgård as Orlok, will premiere on Christmas Day 2024.

The first Silents Synced presentation, pairing Radiohead and Nosferatu, will be screened nationwide this fall. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

Nosferatu (1922)

Vampire Count Orlok expresses interest in a new residence and real estate agent Hutter’s wife.