KILLDEER - H.P. Lovecraft was a very weird dude.

It might be fair to say that people who love the long-dead father of horror fiction are somewhat weird dudes and dudettes, too.

A lot of them are goths, those interesting people who wear all black and pierce various body parts, like eyebrows and lips.

Troy Sterling Nies, of Killdeer, doesn't fit the goth mode, not by a long shot. Still, he holed up in a small in-home studio in his house behind the school in Killdeer. On piano, keyboard and complex computer integration, he wrote a sweeping musical score for a Lovecraft-based movie.

But before we get to Nies, a Mandan native, husband and dad of two children, let's deal with Lovecraft. Those whose literary acquaintance doesn't quite wrap around him are wondering, "Who is he, anyway?"

Lovecraft is a name any fiction author would give his writing arm for. But it's hardly a household name, like Stephen King, or even Clive Barker, both of whom pay homage to Lovecraft as a pioneer of the horror genre.

Lovecraft wrote in the '20s and '30s, delivering queer and very stylized pulp stories that chilled and thrilled the few people who read them back when flappers were scandalous, public drinking was prohibited and our grandmothers were just getting married.

He died, of course, and as often happens to artists, and has become something of a modern-day cult figure even as he molders so long in the grave.

Part of his modern-day fame dates back to the '80s, when a video game company released a game based on his story "The Call of Cthulhu."

Nies is a fan of Lovecraft's writing and has been for quite some time.

Nies also is a pianist since he was a boy, a boy who ran home to play the music that kept running through his head. He studied piano and music through high school and college, both at Bismarck and Dickinson State colleges.

In an odd twist, in the same way that truth is stranger than even Lovecraft's fiction, that love is blind and luck is dumb, Nies stumbled onto a way to put his music composition skills and his love of Lovecraft together.

He was browsing around the Internet one day and discovered that two California guys, both members of a serious and not-so-serious H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, were making a movie based on the "The Call of Cthulhu," a story that blends the occult, a wooden idol and a secret society of idol worshippers.

Various amateur filmmakers have tried their hand at recreating Lovecraft's stories on film for an audience of H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society members from around the world.

The California guys, Andrew Leman and Sean Branney, had a different idea.

They envisioned a Lovecraft silent movie, filmed in black and white, with subtitles and a full-blown musical score.

Reviewers for this niche film have called the silent film idea a stroke of genius for the way it puts the movie style into the period when Lovecraft was writing.

Leman said Lovecraft fans share a love of reading and tend to be open-minded and imaginative.

Not all of them are goths. "Lots of us look and act like perfectly normal people," he said.

The producers needed someone to both compose and produce the film's music, which had to have the same effect that the organ and piano had in the old movie houses, helping to create the drama, the suspense and build the action from one scene to the next.

Nies, from his small studio in a small town in western North Dakota, said he'd like to give it a shot.

Leman said most of Nies' initial composing for the movie was based on descriptions and concepts, without access to the visuals.

"I will never forget the thrill I got when I watched the scenes with his music for the first time," Leman said. "I was unprepared for how powerful they would become when Nies's music was added."

Branney said Nies was tireless, cooperative and has the ability to write music that sounds like old movie scores and is charged with emotional power and can drive the story forward.

"We could not be happier with the music he wrote," Branney said. "It is an essential part of this film's success."

The movie won best of show at a Lovecraft film festival in October in Portland.

The project came at just the right time in Nies's own life.

He'd gone through a dark period, when he couldn't touch or play music, and was just emerging from that darkness when the Lovecraft opportunity happened by.

Influenced by the hair-raising music of "Star Wars" from boyhood and classical music in later years, Nies already knew that he wanted to write scores that were both symphonic and epic in size and sound.

In his "real" life in Killdeer, Nies is a paramedic for the local ambulance service. On those calls, he hears the full range of human emotion; the harmony of a mother's gentle tears played to her newborn's cry, the pianissimo of those last quiet breaths before death and the cacophony of fear and panic.

"I need to put the energy of that from the negative to the positive," Nies said.

"I have to synthesize up and down the scale of being - I've cried and laughed with patients."

From the very first, he said he knew exactly what the music for the silent horror movie should sound like.

He already understood that there's no such thing as a "silent film," because of the music, which is like another character in the movie.

He would completely lose track of time in his studio, taking his original score and assigning a computerized instrument from the orchestra of choices.

Time was of the essence, and he not only created the score on computer, but also used it to transmit the finished product to the filmmakers in California.

Nies was able to attend the film's premiere at the festival in Portland. The audience cheered and laughed.

"They've been waiting for a good Lovecraft movie for ages and this is it, I guess," Nies said.

There may be another Lovecraft movie in his future. Nies hopes to write more symphonic scores, the kind of music he hears in his mind and the kind that comes naturally through his fingers.

"This is not luck. I worked too hard to get to this point," he said. What he'd love is access to a real orchestra, instead of the one he can create in his studio with switches and keystrokes.

"I'll write for any orchestra in the state," he said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@;westriv.com.)