Mark Korven is a Toronto based composer for film and television. He is best known for his work on the 2015 period Horror film THE WITCH, which won the best director award at Sundance for director Robert Eggers.
He also scored Egger’s follow up THE LIGHTHOUSE starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson which won the Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
He has composed for episodic television such as Ridley Scott's THE TERROR: INFAMY, THEM, CHAPELWAITE, and the #1 Amazon science fiction series THE PERIPHERAL.
Director Scott Derrickson chose Korven to score his feature film THE BLACK PHONE which earned $161 million at the box office on it's $18 million budget.
Korven is also a multi-instrumentalist specializing in world music, and together with Tony Duggan-Smith developed the notorious horror musical instrument THE APPREHENSION ENGINE.
“The score for The Witch sets a new standard in horror film composition”
- Blumhouse.com
“The Lighthouse: Mark Korven's nerve-jangling atonal score of brass, woodwinds and percussion mixes with the intricately layered soundscape of crashing waves and stinging wind, and foghorn blasts that might be mistaken for the cries of whales or the roars of sea monsters.”
- Hollywood Reporter
“Mark Korven’s score for The Witch is chilling, operatic and sinister”
- Indie Wire
“The Witch is one of the most unsettling scores I’ve ever heard”
- Bloody Disgusting.com
“The Witch scared the hell out of me”
- Stephen King (Twitter)
Korven’s score for The Black Phone reverberates in your ribs, sinks into your eardrums, and at times sounds like you’re hearing it from underground in the Grabber’s basement.
- RogerEbert.com
"The First Omen" is loaded with his trademark dynamic instrumentation, gifting a deeply unsettling sound to this sincerely sinister flick. If you ask me, this might be Korven's best work yet.
- Slashfilm.com
“On of cinema's scariest composers”
- Film Score Monthly