Live Review: Morricone Youth: Night Of The Living Dead Live Score

One of the undoubted highlights of this year's festival is the savvy inclusion of New York's Morricone Youth, a cult favourite in the Big Apple who enjoy several residencies across the city, specialising in reimagining film scores for cult classics using a fairly traditional six-piece band.

George A Romero was a film punk that rattled cages with his 1968 film Night Of The Living Dead. It was a watershed moment for genre cinema, boasting positively indecent levels of violence and horror, and had the stones to cast an unknown black actor as its heroic lead. It is the foundation stone for all modern horror filmmaking, confidently sketching out rules and tropes that are still diligently followed today. To set this grinding noir nightmare to a relentless motorik kosmische score is ingenious.

The music dovetailed smartly with the film as it played on screen, allowing the dialogue and foley to dominate, stepping in to add heft, funk and roaring terror when required. The group circled a few main themes, toying with several variations in tempo and occasionally adding to the foley track. They obviously have a healthy appreciation for the Italian prog maestros Goblin. The elegantly spooky keyboard riff underpinning that band's unforgettable score for Dario Argento's masterpiece, Suspiria, informed a key motif throughout Morricone Youth's performance.

As the shambling flesh-eaters besieged the rapidly disintegrating farmhouse, the band crashed and thumped through their set, chugging guitars jostling next to screaming synth barrages as their wonderful vocalist howled over the top like some kind of hellish theremin. The final tragic scene of the local militia gunning down the wrong man was brought to horrifying life as the band lurched through their main theme one more time, grainy stills of meat hooks and vanquished ghouls splashing across the screen under the admirably short credits.