“It was definitely a work in progress, but it was just instantly clear. It was amazing,” Remy tells RANGE. 

Remy’s first-ever venture into scoring a film, Toronto filmmaker Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover offers a refreshing, uniquely Canadian take on Frankenstein – featuring Glowicki as a lonely gravedigger attempting to reanimate her betrothed’s corpse. Her undead lover is fittingly portrayed by fellow Toronto filmmaker and Glowicki’s real-life partner Ben Petrie. 

Shot entirely in a Toronto studio on 16mm, with actors sometimes appearing as multiple characters, Dead Lover is a triumph for indie Canadian horror-comedy. “Grace is the kind of artist that’s really full picture. She is a music lover and cares a lot about it, and so we really did [the score] together,” says Remy. “She sent me a bunch of prompts, like written prompts for the characters. I just improvised on MIDI or guitar, looking only at the worded prompts.” 

Working with Glowicki, Remy described the scoring process as “a collage,” often combining various sources of sound. “We just started collaging. Literally throwing stuff at the timeline,” she says. “I’d throw a bunch of stuff at it, send it to Grace, she’d throw stuff at it, send it back, and we just passed it back and forth.”

Remy’s experiments included options from her own archives, and even the public domain. “Why don’t I go through all my hard drives and see what I have that’s already existing? All these kinds of scraps, random little sound experiments that I’ve done over the years. What if we start digging into public domain recordings that are pre-1922, so they’re copyright free?”

Describing the procedure as “instinctual,” Remy soon found a way to harmonize her sound with Dead Lover. “We started realizing those recordings have a similar fidelity to my early tape recordings,” she says. “Patterns started emerging. We’re getting this fidelity pattern starting to emerge.” 

Remy’s soft, electronic score is wrapped up with the end-credits song “You’ve Got Everything (But A Smile),” which she described as a “big pop moment reveal at the end.”

Having lived in Toronto for 18 years, Remy spoke about Glowicki and the film scene with excitement. “She lives basically down the street from me, and she’s connected to this whole world of actors. Now there’s this other vein to hit that opens up this other world of Toronto.”

According to Remy, the originality of Dead Lover speaks to the city’s culture. “I’ve never lived or even known of a place like Toronto that is so overflowing with talent. It’s unreal how everyone cross-pollinates and mingles.”

With a stop in Austin for Dead Lover’s run at SXSW, it will be Remy’s first time at a film festival. “I would love to do more of it. And I’d love to make a film someday. It’s such a great medium and it’s exciting.” 

Order a copy of RANGE Magazine’s Spring print edition here to read more about Meg Remy and the influential films that shaped her.