They're coming to rescore you, Barbra

Morricone Youth, clad in Michael Myers masks while covering the Halloween theme

In 2015, the Jersey Journal interviewed guitarist Devon E. Levins, the founder of the New York band Morricone Youth, about Morricone Youth's live rescore of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Since 1999, the band has specialized in rock-style covers of '60s and '70s film and TV score compositions by the likes of Ennio Morricone (whom the band was named after), Lalo Schifrin and Henry Mancini. In recent years, they've also been performing live rescores of silent movies and the occasional post-silent-era work that opted for pre-existing library music cues instead of spending extra cash on recruiting a composer to write and record an original score. One such post-silent-era work was the famously ultra-low-budget Night of the Living Dead.

Yeah, that's not the kind of goblin Levins was referring to, Jersey Journal.

Devon E. Levins (far right), performing with one of his other bands, Creedle

Levins meant Goblin, the Italian rock band that's best known for its largely synthy yet somehow timeless-sounding original scores for Dario Argento thrillers and Zombi, the European recut of Dawn of the Dead, Romero's 1978 sequel to Night of the Living Dead (some of Goblin's Zombi cues popped up in the original version of Dawn as well). One of the merits of Morricone Youth's rescore of Night--which Morricone Youth released as an EP in September after a year of performing it live, in addition to releasing an EP of their rescore of the technically impressive (but also massively racist) 1926 German animated movie The Adventures of Prince Achmed--is the way that the band's Goblin-style rescore strengthens the connective tissue between the first two Dead installments and makes the first Dead flick feel closer to the partially Goblin-scored 1978 sequel, sonically speaking.