Three distinct moments are often confused when looking for the ending music. David Hess’s song belongs to the earlier massacre before Ruth arrives; Lincoln’s letter has a Morricone accompaniment.
David Hess’s song does not accompany the letter
Now You’re All Alone is a David Hess song from The Last House on the Left, the 1972 film directed by Wes Craven. Tarantino includes it in The Hateful Eight during the flashback showing the Domergue gang’s occupation of the haberdashery. It is linked to Charly’s death at Gage’s hands. It is not the string piece that accompanies the final reading of Lincoln’s letter, and it should not be attributed to Ennio Morricone either.
The distinction comes down to two scenes with very different functions. The flashback reconstructs violence the viewer did not know about and reveals how the false hospitality was prepared. The letter reading happens when identities and alliances have already been exposed. Confusing their music erases that difference between uncovering a past betrayal and contemplating what remains after the clash.
The official album includes Now You’re All Alone credited to Hess. Near the end appear La lettera di Lincoln, in instrumental and dialogue versions, and There Won’t Be Many Coming Home, performed by Roy Orbison. The proximity of these tracks on a disc can encourage associations, but it does not turn the three pieces into a single final theme. Each keeps its own authorship, origin and placement.
Hess’s song also introduces a link with horror cinema that does not depend on Morricone or The Thing. That origin broadens the film’s map of references. The western takes up a piece from another story of cruelty and vulnerability, although its new use must be understood in relation to Charly, not as a direct repeat of the meaning it had in Craven’s film.
Charly and a solitude the song makes perceptible
In the flashback, Charly is part of the shop’s everyday life. The travellers’ arrival seems like a work and hospitality situation before turning into a massacre. When her survival depends on Gage, her attempts to win mercy do not change the attacker’s decision. The song draws attention to that imbalance: one person asks to keep living, and another administers death as an operational necessity.
The theme’s relative softness creates a contrast with the action. It does not turn the scene into a pleasant pause. It can make the vulnerability more visible than an exclusively aggressive piece of music would. The title, without needing to reproduce the lyrics, points towards the isolation of someone who has lost any chance of help. The gang controls the place, and the victim no longer has any relationship that can protect them.
The effect also depends on what we know about Gage at that point in the story. During the first part, he had maintained the image of a reserved man, occupied with his notebook and his supposed return to family life. The flashback replaces that cover with concrete behaviour. The song accompanies the discovery of a cruelty that does not require a theatrical outburst. Gage can act with a calm that is incompatible with the reassuring story he offered to Ruth.
This use of pre-existing music does not need to be explained as a documented statement by the director about Charly’s psychology. The relationship between the musical texture and the scene allows a critical reading in its own right. It is worth keeping that distinction: one can describe what the edit produces without inventing an interview in which Tarantino formulated exactly the same interpretation.
What is heard in the reading and in the credits
The reading of the letter uses La lettera di Lincoln, by Morricone. The accompaniment allows an emotional modulation after the violence, but it does not make the letter true or absolve the men who hear it. The viewer knows that Warren had recognised its falsity. The music acts on a shared experience of reading, not on the authenticity of a presidential document.
That difference makes the final emotion unstable. The words can offer an image of respect and coexistence that contrasts with what happened in the haberdashery. At the same time, they come from a fabrication used to survive among racist people. The piece can sustain the intimacy of the moment without resolving that contradiction. The feeling a story produces does not always depend on its origin being true, even if that falsity still has consequences.
Roy Orbison’s entry in the credits opens up another register. There Won’t Be Many Coming Home retains a horizon of loss that speaks to the story’s outcome. Its presence should not be projected back onto the whole reading or confused with Hess’s voice. The film successively uses an instrumental composition tied to the document and a song that accompanies the story’s ending.
The score and music selection of The Hateful Eight is best understood by keeping these three moments separate: Hess with Charly, Morricone during the letter, and Orbison in the credits. The distinction makes it possible to find the recording being sought and, above all, to recognise three ways of relating music and violence: drawing near to a victim, sustaining a shared fiction, and saying farewell to a world from which only survivors are left.
Back to the The Hateful Eight guide.