Jesper Kyd interview: On memories of ‘Tumbbad’ and the indelible legacy of ‘Assassin’s Creed’

Eight years since Sohum Shah’s folk-horror classic graced Indian screens, Danish composer Jesper Kyd reflects on conjuring ‘Tumbbad’s otherworldly sonic mythology and the evocative emotional legacy of the Ezio trilogy

Updated - October 12, 2026 12:38 pm IST

Jesper Kyd | Photo Credit: Ben Bentley

It’s not every day that you get to speak with one of your childhood idols, especially when their work has been so instrumental in shaping your own enthusiasms. Having dedicated a sizeable chunk of my childhood scampering across the terracotta rooftops of Renaissance-era Italy in Ubisoft’s seminal Assassin’s Creed II, Jesper Kyd’s infatuating original score was transforming the fun I had parkouring across the Il Doumo in Florence into a formative emotional experience. It is one of the biggest reasons I fell so irrevocably in love with videogames as a medium.

That the 54-year-old Danish composer behind my Renaissance reveries had also gone on to score the mythological nightmare of Tumbbad in 2018, was reason enough to seek him out. With the Indian horror landmark approaching its anniversary this year, I finally had the perfect excuse to pick his brain about both these utterly mesmerising sonic landscapes.

Jesper Kyd | Photo Credit: Ben Bentley

Jesper’s collaboration with Sohum Shah on Rahi Anil Barve’s folk-horror fever dream, is among the more unexpected entries in his eclectic catalogue of compositions. Written by Mitesh Shah, Adesh Prasad, Barve and Anand Gandhi, with Barve and Prasad directing, the film stars Shah as Vinayak Rao, whose lifelong pursuit of a hidden treasure in a rain-soaked village in Maharashtra becomes a grotesque tale of greed and generational rot. The film premiered in the Critics’ Week section of the 75th Venice International Film Festival, becoming the first Indian film to screen in the section, before opening in cinemas on October 12, 2018, to widespread critical acclaim for its storytelling, cinematography and painstaking production design. It has since then gained a cult following and is widely considered one of the greatest Indian horror films of the 21st century.

Jesper’s unlikely union with the production came about when Tumbbad co-director Adesh Prasad, found himself drawn to ‘Apocalypse’, a track Jesper had composed for Hitman: Blood Money. Asked what he believed Tumbbad had got right to endure in the years since, Jesper says, “As soon as I saw the footage, I could feel that there was something honest and real about the film. It brought together two of my favourite genres: fantasy and horror. There was an earthy realism to the film that I can’t quite explain. Everything felt so tangible, even as supernatural elements entered the story.”

A still from ‘Tumbbad’ | Photo Credit: Sohum Shah Films

Having never worked on an Indian production before, he found himself entering unfamiliar territory. “I’d never worked on an Indian production before, so I was thrown straight into something new. I worked closely with Adesh, and our conversations focused on what the score should be and how far we could push it. We wanted a score that felt original. The goal was to make something that just kind of oozed that world. This score only works for Tumbbad.”

The music of Tumbbad was built from an array of dissonant strings, pounding percussion, manipulated acoustic instruments and electronic textures. A majority of its disconcerting motif’s were at once tactile and unearthly, with whispers, finger snaps and the occasional musical saw making everything sound all the more elemental and primordial. Asked whether he and Prasad consciously sought to make the film sound Indian without resorting to familiar cinematic signifiers, Jesper says, “Adesh did send me videos about Indian culture and festivals, which inspired me, and I interpreted those influences in my own way. We were more interested in finding something in between a sound that felt otherworldly and wasn’t tied too firmly to anything familiar. It needed to seem as though it came from an alternate place, from this particular universe”.

The search led him towards unusual instruments and unconventional playing techniques, with the cymbalom becoming one of the score’s principal sonic signatures: “The cymbalom is a type of dulcimer, a hammered-string instrument. The dulcimer is associated with Hungary, where it’s the national instrument. So it gave us a sound that felt as though it belonged in India, but also didn’t. We also played it in an unusual way. Instead of hammering the strings as you normally would, we scraped across them, which immediately created an interesting sound. I then processed it with music effects to give it a rich texture.”