Update: Fever Ray says she will not be appearing in “Red Riding Hood” but that she has penned a new song for the film.
We may not have been overly enamored with the “Twilight“-meets-a-Meatloaf-video charms of the trailer for Catherine Hardwicke‘s “Red Riding Hood,” a teen-friendly retelling of the classic myth, when it debuted yesterday, but there was one aspect of the preview that this writer liked — the sinister electro-folk backing. As one commenter astutely pointed out, the clip sounded awfully like Swedish vocalist Karin Dreijer Andersson, of electro band “The Knife,” but it wasn’t a song that we were familiar with.
As it turns out, Catherine Hardwicke talked to Hero Complex about the film, and revealed that not only is the song Andersson’s, but she’ll appear in the film. Hardwicke says that there’s a scene in the film reminiscent of Burning Man Festival where the townspeople “build this giant wolf effigy, a huge bonfire, everyone’s dancing like crazy and partying and going wild, so I used the Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights as my inspiration for that. We built all the instruments in the Bosch painting, a hurdy gurdy, standing horn pipes, the same blue drums.”
It’s in this scene that Andersson will appear, in the guise of her side-project Fever Ray, whose self-titled album was one of the best records of last year. Hardwicke relates that “We commissioned this band from Sweden called Fever Ray. She’s always performing in radical costumes, she’s like the Lady Gaga of Sweden. In our movie she’s wearing a harvest mask with a corn husk face and she’s singing and everybody’s dancing and singing.”
The song heard in the trailer is the one to be performed during the scene, written by Andersson with the film’s composer Brian Reitzell (“30 Days of Night,” and music supervisor on a number of Sofia Coppola films). Hardwicke says of the track, displaying an articulacy worthy of Bella Swan: “I loved it cause it was haunting. I felt like it was ancient, but edgy and modern.”
From the trailer, the track is by no means our favorite of Andersson’s work, but it’s still quite strong. More importantly, having seen Fever Ray in the flesh in Berlin a while back, they’re one of the most astonishing live acts around, and, along with Gary Oldman‘s purple jacket, their appearance should be one of the few highlights of “Red Riding Hood” when it’s released on March 11th, 2011. While you’re waiting, check out the video for Fever Ray’s “If I Had A Heart” below.