Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror review – musical mash-up tries for new approach

<p>This new approach to silent cinema is like trying to watch a movie while your neighbour has their music on too loud</p><p>How should we watch silent films now? When they were first produced and consumed, they were after all just films, not “silent” films – any more than photographs or paintings or sculptures are thought of as “silent”. Yet of course they often had improvised piano accompaniment; Gert Hoffman’s autobiographical novel The Film Explainer (filmed with Armin Mueller-Stahl) remembered the prewar time in Germany when his father was employed in a movie theatre to stand next to the screen with a pointer and literally explain what was going on. When <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/monumental-reckoning-how-abel-gances-napoleon-was-restored-full-glory-0">Abel Gance’s Napoleon was revived in the late 70s</a> with a live orchestral accompaniment, there was a new creative excitement around the idea of early cinema’s musical reinvention – we recently saw the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/21/battleship-potemkin-review-eisenstein-pet-shop-boys">re-release of the special edition of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin</a> with the 2005 soundtrack composed for the film by the Pet Shop Boys.</p><p>But now an artistic group from Austin, Texas, called Silents Synced and its director Josh Frank are offering a new approach to silent cinema: showing classics to music by established stars. This one, Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror puts <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/31/nosferatu-silent-horror-movie-100-years">Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu</a> with Radiohead’s Kid A from 2000 and Amnesiac from 2001. But I just couldn’t make friends with this fundamentally wrong-headed idea. Radiohead’s music isn’t composed for the film, it doesn’t illuminate it or intensify it or work interestingly against it; it