Before the big studio breakthroughs, before the James Newton Howard run, M. Night Shyamalan’s first two features were scored by Edmund Choi. That makes Choi easy to overlook in the wider story, but he is right there at the beginning of the filmography, shaping the sound of Praying with Anger and Wide Awake.
Those films are smaller, more intimate works than the titles that made Shyamalan a household name, and Choi’s music fits that scale. The emotional focus is less about grand reveal mechanics and more about inner searching, family tension, grief, and spiritual restlessness. That makes his place in the archive important. He was scoring Night before the public version of “a Shyamalan movie” had fully settled into place.
Choi’s two-film run also gives the early career a sense of continuity. Praying with Anger and Wide Awake are very different films on the surface, but both are personal in ways that later Shyamalan projects often hide inside genre frameworks. The music helps hold that emotional honesty in place.
Shyamalan projects scored by Edmund Choi
- Praying with Anger (1992)
- Wide Awake (1998)
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