West Dylan Thordson occupies a very specific place in M. Night Shyamalan’s music history. He is the composer who took over during the Split and Glass stretch, which means he had to do something unusually tricky. He was not starting from zero, but he also could not simply imitate the James Newton Howard years. He had to help define a newer, rougher, more contemporary sound while still operating inside a world audiences already associated with James Newton Howard.
That tension is what makes Thordson so interesting in the Shyamalan orbit. His work on Split and Glass does not feel like a clean continuation of the old orchestral era. It feels like a fracture line. The sound is more abrasive, more stripped down, more tactile, and in places almost industrial in its unease.
The sound of Split
Split was Thordson’s first Shyamalan score, and it immediately announced a change in texture. Public descriptions of the score from later soundtrack materials called it “sonic, sinister and foreboding,” and Thordson described starting with “simple harmonic bowing ideas” recorded with a cellist and violinist. That alone tells you a lot about the aesthetic. This was not a grand heroic symphonic lane. It was built from tension, abrasion, repetition, and unstable string color.
Shyamalan later described the approach to Split as having “almost a Nine Inch Nails-y vibe,” saying they were taking cello sounds and “turning it and twisting it and bending it.” That is probably the cleanest quick summary of what Thordson brought into the filmography. Split sounds contemporary in a way the earlier Shyamalan scores usually did not. It feels closer to damage than to majesty.
That made him a strong fit for Kevin Wendell Crumb’s world. Split is not a story that wants lush consolation. It wants unease, fragmentation, trapped energy, and the creeping sense that the room itself is tightening. Thordson’s music does not smooth those edges out. It leans into them.
Then came Glass
Glass was the harder assignment. Now Thordson was not only following his own work on Split. He was also moving into direct contact with Unbreakable, which meant dealing with one of the most distinctive scores in the whole Shyamalan catalogue.
In production material published around the film, Shyamalan put the challenge very plainly. Glass, he said, was a sequel to “two movies from two different generations,” with Unbreakable carrying an old-school orchestral identity and Split pushing toward something harsher and more modern. The answer was not to choose one and ignore the other. The answer was for Thordson to take the Unbreakable themes and revise them in his own style, making them “more minimalized, very, very simple and stripped down,” while also bringing forward the thematic work he had already done in Split.
That balancing act is the real story of his Shyamalan collaboration. He was not there to impersonate Howard, and he was not there to sever the trilogy from its past either. He was there to translate older material into a new voice without breaking the line of continuity.
How he built Glass
Thordson’s own comments about Glass are especially useful because they make clear how physical his process was. In an interview with We Are Movie Geeks, he described arriving early, spending time on the set at Allentown State Hospital, and recording percussion ideas there at night after the crew had wrapped. He talked about working in empty buildings and underground tunnels, sometimes recording until four in the morning. Violinist Tim Fain joined him there too, cutting violin material in those spaces, including tunnels and the actual “Pink Room.”
That is one of those stories that makes the finished score click a little differently. Glass sounds dark in a very physical way. It sounds as if it was shaped in spaces that already felt haunted, clinical, and wrong.
On the released Glass score material, Thordson explained that he wanted sounds that felt “brittle and sharp,” with violin and metal percussion becoming the main voices he built from. He said the combination of melody and dissonance was meant to play to Elijah Price’s thrilling, playful energy, while the longer gnarled sounds and cleaner orchestral elements helped represent the film’s blend of light and dark. He also described the score as being “largely about discovery and acceptance.”
That last phrase matters. Glass is full of collision, but it is also a film about revelation. The music needs to carry both the instability and the weird exhilaration of people finally being seen for what they are.
Why his Shyamalan run stands out
Thordson’s Shyamalan stretch was short compared with Howard’s, but it was important. He gave Split and Glass a musical identity that fit the bruised, late-period evolution of this filmography. The sound was less sweeping, less romantic, and more confrontational. It felt like a filmmaker testing a different set of nerves.
That is why Thordson deserves more than a stub. He was the composer who had to stand at the hinge between two Shyamalan eras and make the handoff feel artistically intentional rather than merely practical. That is not a small task, and his best music in this run makes the risk feel worthwhile.
Related pages:
Sources and further reading:
Be the first to comment