How Nick Cave’s Score Helped ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’ Sound Stale, Dark and Empty

David Klotz landed three Emmy nominations for his work as a sound editor across very different shows.

Klotz worked on Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, House of the Dragon and Stranger Things. His biggest challenge was tackling the insertion of Metallicas Master of Puppets in Stranger Things.

With Netflixs Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the dark and twisted story of the serial killer, veteran gloom-rocker Nick Cave and his frequent collaborator Warren Ellis worked on the score. Klotz took a different approach since the duo had scored the pilot and wrote an entire library of music. Klotz says by having an entire library, We were taking cues and fitting them into making them work and find a throughline for certain characters and moments. He didnt have to rely on temp music.

Like many of the crew working on the series, he had no idea what to expect. I was taken aback at how still, dark and spare it looked and sounded, he says. He took those visual clues as well as the score to reflect the stale, dark emptiness that ran through the story. It wasnt moving at a breakneck speed, so there was a lot of space and we used that to enhance that feeling.

In comparison, Klotz says Stranger Things was challenging because of the length. It was longer than most feature-length films, he of the 142 minute-long season four finale. However, he had the perfect collaborators, the Duffer brothers. He says, They are amazing at knowing how music works and how it enhances the story. He adds, They had big ideas about what they wanted to do with music.

Metallicas Master of Puppets plays in one important sequence as Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) heads into the Upside Down with the rest of the Hawkins crew and promises to take on the evil Vecna.

Eddie grabs his guitar and plays Master of Puppets by Metallica, performing the most metal concert ever. As he riffs on his guitar, the bats surrounding Vecnas lair are lured away, leaving Steve (Joe Keery), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Robin (Maya Hawke) to attack the demon.

Says Klotz, When the Duffers called me and said, Hey, we need an edit of the Metallica song, they gave me a rough of what the edit should be. Once he had that, he called music supervisor Nora Felder to see if she had an instrumental version of it. She sent me a link to download the multitrack stems from the band. We had everything separated guitars, drums and bass. That allowed me the freedom to create anything that the Duffer brothers wanted.

He wanted the song to sound alive like Eddie was performing the song in the moment. However, even with the isolated tracks, the song still sounded like it had this 80s sheen on it. Klotz says, Our producer was able to connect with the bands bass player Rober Trujillo, and his 17-year-old son Tye Trujillo was able to play.

With Tye Trujillo playing the opening bars, Klotz went in and added more guitar sounds in the background. He says, I was able to edit it and make it sound like it could seamlessly transfer from feeling live into the Metallica track.