The Piper (Millennium Films, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 4) my husband Charles and I watched two movies online from the computer, Erlinger Thoroddsen’s The Piper (2023) and Charles T. Barton’s Smooth as Silk (1946). I got The Piper from Amazon Prime, and though it was a free screening it was riddled with commercials; oh, how I wish they’d made this one available on DVD or Blu-Ray like they did with all the other movies whose soundtracks I’m reviewing for the May-June 2025 Fanfare. The Piper is one of that odd sub-genre of horror tales that revolves around a cursed object or thing, which arguably started with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” (1891) and W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902). Though I’ve read other examples, including Anthony Boucher’s “The Anomaly of the Empty Man” (1952), in which a great soprano of the early 20th century who was also a practicing Satanist made a record that, if played backwards, would instantly whisk the listener to Hell (Boucher, an opera fanatic as well as a writer, lived long enough to go through the so-called “backward-masking” controversy in which certain heavy-metal bands were alleged to have sneaked Satanic messages onto their records by playing them backwards, and after the first time I read that story I wondered if Boucher thought of the backward-masking issue, “Hey! That sounds like a story I wrote in 1952!”), the trend in movies seems to have started with a 1998 Japanese horror film called Ringu. That movie dealt with a killer videotape whose viewers invariably die within seven days after they’ve seen it. Ringu was remade in English in 2002 as The Ring, and another variant, Antrim, followed from Canada in 2018, in which instead of a lethal videotape it was a lethal surviving print of a theatrically released film.

In The Piper the deadly object is a tune that was used as the basis for a concerto for flute, children’s choir and orchestra by Katharine Fleischer (Louise Gold). I wonder if the name “Fleischer,” the German word for “butcher,” is supposed to be symbolic. At the one performance of her concerto in 1975, the hall caught fire during the last movement, the children were apparently killed in the fire and never seen again, and Katharine banned further performances of the concerto. Now it’s 2023, the hall has been rebuilt, and the conductor in charge of the orchestra there, Gustafson (Julian Sands in his last acting job before he himself disappeared on California’s Mount Baldy in January 2023; the film was dedicated to his memory), is determined to hold a big anniversary concert there honoring Katharine’s memory. Only just before rehearsals for the concert are scheduled to begin, Katharine is burned to death in a prologue. She was trying to destroy the last movement of her concerto, but some supernatural force intervened and set her on fire instead, while preserving the concerto manuscript, albeit with some missing bits. The central character is Melanie Walker (Charlotte Hope), a flutist in the Virgil Hall orchestra who’s run afoul of Gustafson for playing off his rhythm in the opening flute solo of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. He’s threatening to fire her, and she desperately needs the job not only for her own support but because she’s a single mother raising a hearing-impaired child named Zoe (Aoibhe O’Flanagan) and teaching her to play the recorder. She’s composed her own flute concerto which she asks Gustafson to play instead of Katharine’s, but Gustafson imperially insists she’s not yet a good enough composer to have a piece performed by his orchestra. He’s also threatening to fire her completely. There’s another flute player in the section, the ferociously ambitious (and drop-dead gorgeous) male Franklin (Philipp Christopher), who’s written his own concerto and offers it instead of Melanie’s.

Melanie offers to obtain the score of Katharine’s concerto, or what’s left of it, and prepare it for performance. Gustafson gives her a week and tells her that if she doesn’t come through, she’s out of a job. Melanie visits Katharine’s surviving sister Alice (Pippa Winslow), who tells her in no uncertain terms that Katharine didn’t want the concerto to be performed again and literally gave her life to keep that from happening. No problem: Melanie simply breaks into Alice’s home and steals the wooden box containing the manuscript as well as two reel-to-reel tapes of Katharine playing a piano reduction of the first two movements. Alas, strange things start happening around the incomplete music; Melanie starts having nosebleeds from listening to the tapes, Zoe and her childhood friend Colin (Oliver Savell) – son of Melanie’s best friend in the orchestra, violinist Nancy (Kate Nichols) – sneak-listen to the tapes and then find they can’t get to sleep, and Nancy herself goes through a frantic violin practice after she hears the forbidden music. Ultimately, in a vain attempt to get Zoe to sleep, Melanie reads her, as a bedtime story, the fairy tale of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” – and this, along with a Latin message on one of the tapes Melanie’s former music teacher Philip (Alexis Rodney) was able to decipher and Melanie used a computer to translate into English, gives Melanie the clues she needs to figure out what’s going on. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that the main theme of the concerto’s last movement is the very music with which the Pied Piper in the fairy tale (which I remember from grade school in Robert Browning’s poetic adaptation) first led the rats out of Hamelin and then, when the town’s government refused to pay him, used to lead all the children of Hamelin out of the city to heaven knows where.

The Latin message, when translated, reads, “Freed from my prison, I will have my revenge,” and the music of the concerto indeed frees the Pied Piper to take form on Earth and wreak his revenge. At the big concert at which the concerto is performed, the children in the choir walk through a magic doorway and literally disappear. Melanie realizes that the only way she can vanquish the monster is if she and her daughter Zoe play the piece together on flute and recorder, and they do so, the monster dies (and gives forth a swarm of rats representing the Pied Piper’s original mission) and the children – including Colin, who vanished in an earlier scene between him and Zoe involving a game with a big white ball – reappear, and everything seems to be O.K. until Zoe, playing her recorder alone, starts to approach the tune and … The Piper is the sort of modern movie I should very much have liked, but as with Wes Craven’s three-fourths of a masterpiece, Scream (1996), for the first three-quarters of the film writer-director Thoroddsen keeps the horror mostly off-screen and sets up many of his scariest scenes with sound effects alone, Val Lewton-style. Unfortunately, for the last quarter of the film he goes graphic with a big old monster figure with scarred, decrepit face and fiery red eyes charging the camera and offering the modern horror audiences what it wants instead of the artful terror it should be able to appreciate. The person most responsible for the success of The Piper is its composer, Christopher Young. While most film music is written at the very end of the process, after the film is otherwise in final cut, because the concerto figures so prominently in the plot of the film Young literally had to write and record it first, then give the score to Thoroddsen so the actors playing musicians would have something real to play on screen. The Piper is the sort of film that proves once again that “they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” even when they try.