Nightcrawler (2014) is a dark movie, and we’re not just talking about the lighting. Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut follows an incredibly troubled protagonist named Lou Bloom, a conniving cutthroat who makes Taxi Driver (1976)‘s Travis Bickle look like the boy next door. Bloom is a nightcrawler, a “journalist” who sells gory news footage to fear-mongering TV stations. In addition to having the world’s worst job, Bloom is violent, manipulative, and has no regard for right or wrong, going so far as to rearrange corpses to get the perfect shot.

So naturally, with a character this depraved, we’d expect composer James Newton Howard to write a pretty dark score, something heavy and scary that emphasizes Lou’s twisted mind. Only Howard went in the opposite direction: instead of giving us a traditional “bad guy” soundtrack, Howard’s music is surprisingly light, upbeat, and optimistic. In fact, some of the film’s nastiest moments (like the aforementioned scene in which Lou moves the bodies around) feel like sequences from an inspirational drama showing the hero finally beating the odds.

If that seems a little weird, don’t worry. Howard thought it was pretty weird too…at first, anyway. Originally, the composer was planning on writing a score that complimented Lou’s perverse nature, but Dan Gilroy wanted to do something different. Gilroy wanted to take the standard success story and flip it on its head. Basically, he wanted the nightmare version of The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), a movie in which the hardworking “hero” cheats, lies, and murders his way to the top and walks away smiling—and everyone keeps patting him on the back.

In order to achieve this success-story-gone-wrong, Gilroy and Howard decided that instead of writing a score that reinforced what the audience felt (shock, revulsion, disgust), they should create a score that emphasized Lou’s feelings (ambition, elation, pride in his work). So, regarding the corpse sequence, Howard explained, “The whole thing is appalling. The first time I scored it, I couldn’t help but play it in a dark, perverse way, all the things you would expect the music to do.” But Gilroy convinced Howard to shake things up a bit because this isn’t about the audience’s point of view. It’s about Lou Bloom’s, and this is his Cinderella moment.

By using inspirational music, Howard’s score “become an anthem of potential for [Lou’s] tremendous success.” Thanks to the soundtrack, we’re seeing the scene through the bad guy’s eyes, and the music helps us understand that Lou isn’t a normal human being - not at all. Where we see a tragedy, Lou sees opportunity. This is the money shot he’s been waiting for. This is his ticket to the big time.