The Score for Platypus Keeps Its Mistakes On Purpose

Most composers spend their working life removing mistakes. Aoife Josie Clements left them in. “There’s fuckups in my score, like, on purpose,” Clements said at Fantastic Fest, sitting beside director Joshua Gratton, and shots in Platypus drift out of focus in the same spirit. The Super 8 slasher had its world premiere at the festival, and the two of them treat every visible flaw as an argument.

The film reached me secondhand before I ever spoke to them. Word going around the festival had it as the next generation of Gen Z horror filmmaking, which is the phrase I put to them, and it landed awkwardly. “I’m not sure, as a millennial, I’m not sure,” Gratton said. Clements was more amused than anything, joking about being “the closest thing to a Zoomer on this production at 30.”

Friction on Purpose

The Clements theory of why any of this resonates has nothing to do with retro nostalgia. “I think that technology has made our lives so frictionless that people have become desperate for sources of friction,” Clements said. Platypus is friction by design. “You’re constantly keenly aware that there’s a human being producing the work of art that you’re engaging with,” Clements said, listing the actors and the blood that is obviously corn syrup among the things the film never hides.

That distance is only half the equation. “The narrative of the movie is very earnest, and we play everything very, very straight,” Clements said. Gratton framed the same idea as a diagnosis of the modern theater, describing audiences who sit down and feel nothing while things happen on screen. “I think it’s more than just nostalgia at this point,” Gratton said.

Twenty Movies and a Tape Machine

The score started with homework. Gratton came in with a specific idea of which 70s and 80s DIY cinema the film should pull from, and sent Clements away to watch “probably a dozen, maybe 20 movies” for it. What came out of the viewing was a set of rules rather than melodies. “It’s analog synthesizers, it’s recorded largely to tape, it’s very repetitive,” Clements said, adding that those scores were often knockoffs of themes from John Carpenter.

In the studio, Clements would pull up a reference clip and collaborator Jay Arner would build the patch. Nine times out of ten the first thing played was what Gratton wanted, and when it was not they improvised until something stuck. Nothing was quantized. “We just kind of hammered it out like a band,” Clements said. Gratton heard it the same way from the other chair. “It’s so intentional, and we got it pretty much exactly how I wanted it to be,” Gratton said.

Platypus had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 20, 2026, an 85 minute Canadian feature. Gratton wrote, directed, produced and edited, with a score by Aoife Josie Clements and Jay Arner.