FILM TERROR : 'MAESTROS HORROR MENACING'

'Horror's maestros of menace' : A film composing duo have made the stuff of nightmares their specialty.
There's a lot meant to freak out audiences in ''The Grudge,'' the horror reboot that opened this month. One of them is the sound of the peacocks.

The birds don't appear in the film, but their startling squaks can be heard, in digitally altered form.
''They're beautiful, but the way they sound is pretty unsettling,'' said Taylor Newton Stewart, 41, one half of the composing duo behind the film's soundtrack.
''It sounds like a cry for help.''

Since 2014, Stewart and Andy Grush, who call themselves the Newton Brothers, though they are not related, have specialized in music in the key of fear. Their compositions have accompanies and augmented the terror of demonic possession:
''Ouija : Origin of Evil'',
''See No Evil 2,'' ''Hush''.
childhood trauma ''Oculus,'' ''Gerald's Game'' and all manner of ghastly apparitions ''Before I Wake'' ''The Bye Bye Man''.

Their last soundtrack, for ''Doctor Sleep'', was like an aural haunted house : pounding heartbeats, creaking doors, ominous chants and a low dirty drone that suggested evil lurking behind every door.

When they started collaborating in 2011, they didn't plan on their composing careers revolving around the stuff of nightmares. And the work, they'll freely admit, can exert a psychological toll.

''Being in a dark room staring at dark imagery for a long time, it does get to you,'' Stewart said in a joint phone interview.'' Sometimes you need to step aside and go watch 'Finding Nemo' with your niece.''

In the aughts, Stewart and Grush, 45, mainly worked separately and sometimes uncredited, on other composers scores:
Grush, a self-professed ''classical music nerd'' and pianist, was as an orchestrator; Stewart, the son of an opera singer, as a syntheizer programmer

Meeting through mutual friends, they decided to forge their own composing careers, figuring they could cover more musical ground that way. Sure enough, as a duo, they moved adroitly through scoring projects, from tense political drama to action thriller.

But even though they remain .open to working in any genre, after the success of ''Oculus'' [2014] , directed by Mike Flanagan, they were pegged as maestros of menace.

They became Flanagan's composers of choice, too, having scored six of his horror films so far, including ''Doctor Sleep,'' as well as the Netflix series he created , ''The Haunting of Hill House.''

The World Students Society thanks author Darryn King.