Nathan Barr

Nathan Barr, an Emmy-nominated composer residing in Los Angeles, has earned recognition for his tense, chamber-oriented scores in horror, thriller, and mystery projects. He has worked repeatedly with director Eli Roth on Hostel in 2005 and The House with a Clock in Its Walls in 2018, and he supplied the music for the long-running series True Blood from 2008 to 2014 as well as The Americans from 2013 to 2018.

Having played instruments from the age of four, Barr later pursued studies in music and technology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He performed as guitarist and electric cellist in the alternative metal band VAST, then relocated to Los Angeles in 1996 to enter film and television scoring. Early on he assisted Hans Zimmer on As Good as It Gets in 1997 and The Prince of Egypt the next year, before securing his first solo composing assignment for the 1998 comedy Romance. He continued scoring modest films while contributing additional cues, production work, and cello performances to assorted television, direct-to-video, and documentary productions through the early 2000s, including the reality program Fear and the short-lived CBS drama Kate Brasher.

Although Barr composed for the 2005 big-screen version of The Dukes of Hazzard, his emerging profile centered on atmospheric, unsettling music for horror titles directed by Eli Roth: Cabin Fever in 2002, which incorporated themes by Angelo Badalamenti, Hostel in 2005, and a portion of the 2007 anthology Grindhouse. In 2008 he was chosen to score the HBO series True Blood, remaining with the show for its full seven seasons. During the same stretch he wrote for other programs, among them the Netflix horror series Hemlock Grove from 2013 to 2015 and the FX spy drama The Americans from 2013 to 2018; the main-title themes for both received Emmy nominations in 2013. He partnered with Randy Edelman on the 2015 thriller The Boy Next Door and handled the music for the 2017 Flatliners remake. Barr rejoined Roth for the 2018 adaptation of John Bellairs’s gothic-mystery novel The House with a Clock in Its Walls.