The Dead, Live!

Live music and film are strange bedfellows in the modern age, but it wasn’t always that way. In the silent era, a live accompaniment was standard practice for all films. Today, local musician and filmmaker Paul Buscarello will resurrect that long-gone experience with a performance of his new, original score for the classic Swedish silent film The Phantom Carriage, about a man condemned to collect the souls of the dead for a year.

“I wanted people to have the experience of seeing a silent film, with melodies and each character having a theme — stuff like that,” Buscarello explains. Drawing on Swedish folk music and classic horror-movie scores like those from Halloween and Psycho, Buscarello has crafted a soundtrack that’s both contemporary and true to the roots of the film and the medium as a whole. “I really wanted it to be very modern — there are electronic drums and a lot of different things going on — but I really want that sort of old-timey classic movie experience, where you feel the presence of the piano player doing the accompaniment,” he says.

Experience it at 4 p.m. today at the Sie FilmCenter, 2510 East Colfax Avenue. Tickets are $12 ($10 for DFS members); for more information, visit denverfilm.org.

Sun., Dec. 29, 4 p.m., 2013