American composer Marco Beltrami produced dynamic, rhythm-heavy orchestral music for numerous horror, action, and science fiction films, achieving wide notice through his contributions to Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher Scream and multiple Marvel productions. The 2007 western remake 3:10 to Yuma brought his first Academy Award nomination. Fifteen years after the original, he supplied the score for Scream 4 in 2011, marking his fourth consecutive entry in the franchise. In 2015 he joined Philip Glass to create music for the Marvel Comics release Fantastic Four, while his 2018 work stood out in the horror hit A Quiet Place. Two years afterward he returned for A Quiet Place Part II, then rejoined Marvel without Glass on the 2021 film Venom. Among later projects, he composed the score for John Woo’s 2023 thriller Silent Night.
Born in New York, Beltrami studied at Brown University and the Yale School of Music, later working with Luigi Nono in Italy and apprenticing under Jerry Goldsmith in Los Angeles. He entered film and television scoring in the early 1990s, receiving his first primary composer credit on the 1994 feature Death Match. Subsequent assignments included the 1995 horror film The Whispering and the syndicated series Land’s End (1995–1996) before Scream reached theaters in late 1996. Before the decade closed he wrote music for Guillermo del Toro on Mimic (1997) and for Robert Rodriguez on The Faculty (1998), and he reunited with Craven for Scream 2 (1998).
The following decade began with Scream 3 (2000), again directed by Craven, and Dracula 2000, which Craven executive-produced. Standout scores from those years encompassed Blade II, his first Marvel assignment, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Hellboy (2004) once more with del Toro, and I, Robot starring Will Smith. During the same period he contributed to the final four seasons of the television series The Practice. His 3:10 to Yuma music earned a 2008 Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, followed two years later by a second nomination for the Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker. Early in the 2010s Beltrami completed two final films with Wes Craven, My Soul to Take and Scream 4, both of which proved to be Craven’s last directorial efforts before his death from cancer in 2015.
He returned to Marvel for the 2013 X-Men entry The Wolverine. The year 2015 saw another Marvel release, Fantastic Four, scored with Philip Glass, while the Wolverine sequel Logan appeared in 2017. Beltrami’s A Quiet Place score received a Golden Globe nomination the following year. He broadened his work with the 2018 Nat Geo documentary Free Solo, a collaboration with Brandon Roberts that earned them an Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special. Late in the decade he composed Ford v. Ferrari (2019, with Buck Sanders) and Velvet Buzzsaw (2019, also with Sanders), along with horror projects Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019, with Anna Drubich) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020). He and Brandon Roberts also scored a television reboot of The Twilight Zone. Continuing collaborative efforts in 2021 produced the series Nine Perfect Strangers (with Miles Hankins) and the R.L. Stine Fear Street trilogy (with Roberts, Drubich, and Marcus Trumpp). Beltrami took sole credit for that year’s Marvel release Venom: Let There Be Carnage. He and additional composers supplied material for the AMC+ series Pantheon in 2022 and 2023, a span that also included the thrillers and horror films No Exit, Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water, Plane (with Trumpp) starring Gerard Butler, The Nun II, and Renfield featuring Nicolas Cage as Dracula. He composed the scores for John Woo’s 2023 film Silent Night and the 2024 mystery miniseries Apples Never Fall (with Hankins).
