Watch Buster Keaton and ‘Nosferatu’ With a Soundtrack by Radiohead and R.E.M.

Silent movies practically went extinct a century ago, but they may breathe new life into the movie business in 2024 — and the sound will be loud! Josh Frank, 49, of Austin’s Blue Starlite Drive-In theater, is launching Silents Synced, a series of screenings of silent films with alternative rock scores. It will screen in about 200 theaters nationwide. The innovative program, partly inspired by the Pink Floyd laser light shows and Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight movie screenings of Frank’s youth, could attract over-50 audiences nostalgic for 1990s alt-rock to theaters.

First up is 1922’s Dracula-inspired, extremely influential Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, starring Max Schreck as fanged Count Orlok, without its traditional orchestra score and with its scary scenes instead synchronized to Radiohead’s 2000 Kid A and 2001 Amnesiac art-rock albums. See it and prepare for the Christmas 2024 remake with Bill Skarsgård as Orlok and Willem Dafoe, 69, as the vampire hunter.

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Josh Frank

Courtesy Silents Synced

​The Silents Synced series premieres with Nosferatu Sept. 21-30 in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, California, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, then goes nationwide Oct. 4. New movies will arrive every four months: In February, Buster Keaton’s 1924 masterpiece Sherlock Jr. screens to R.E.M.’s Monster and New Adventures in Hi Fi, along with a Charlie Chaplin short with music by Girls Against Boys, followed in June by Keaton’s 1928 The Cameraman with a They Might Be Giants medley. R.E.M.’s manager told Deadline the band loved “the uncanny way their music and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. match up — kind of perfect. What a great and unlikely way of presenting great art.” Coming up: silent classics paired with Pearl Jam and the Pixies.

​Frank will attend most of the premieres and do a Q&A Sept. 26 at the San Francisco premiere with author-musician Paul Myers, 63 (brother of Mike “Austin Powers” Myers, 61). Frank told AARP about the origins of his unusual fusion of old-ish music and much older cinema:

Courtesy Everett Collection

Why link Nosferatu with Radiohead’s Amnesiac and Kid A?

Nosferatu is an hour and a half, and so are those albums. Even with my learning disability, I can do the math. The music is haunting and driving and delicate, perfect for Nosferatu. The movie starts with a bell tower and Amnesiac starts with a giant bell.

How did you get all those albums when it usually costs a fortune to put one pop song in a movie?

My pitch was, “Hey, I’m not just doing this for me but for every independent cinema in the country.” All the bands said, “We think this is really cool.” It was all very peace and love, which was great, because dealing with music licensing is usually not easy.