Three different moments are often confused when looking for the end 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 song by David Hess from The Last House on the Left, the 1972 film directed by Wes Craven. Tarantino includes it in The Hateful Eight during the flashback that shows the Domergue gang’s takeover 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 from two scenes with very different functions. The flashback reconstructs violence the viewer did not know about and reveals how the false hospitality was set up. The reading of the letter takes place when identities and alliances have already been exposed. Confusing their music erases the difference between uncovering a past betrayal and looking at what remains after the confrontation.
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 those tracks on one album can encourage associations, but it does not turn the three pieces into a single final theme. Each one keeps its own authorship, origin, and placement.
Hess’s song also introduces a connection to horror cinema that does not depend on Morricone or The Thing. That origin broadens the film’s map of references. The western borrows a piece from another story of cruelty and vulnerability, although its new use should be read in relation to Charly, not as an automatic repetition of the meaning it had in Craven’s film.
Charly and a loneliness the song makes perceptible
In the flashback, Charly is part of the establishment’s ordinary life. The travelers’ arrival seems like a work and hospitality situation before it turns into a massacre. When his survival depends on Gage, his attempts to win mercy do not change the attacker’s decision. The song draws attention to that imbalance: one person asks to keep living while another carries out his death as a necessary part of the operation.
The song’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 a purely aggressive score would. The title, without needing to repeat the lyrics, points to the isolation of someone who has lost any chance of help. The gang controls the place, and the victim no longer has a relationship that can protect him.
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, busy with his notebook and his supposed return to family. The flashback replaces that cover with concrete behavior. 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 Ruth.
This use of preexisting 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 on its own. It is worth keeping that difference in mind: you can describe what the edit produces without inventing an interview in which Tarantino stated exactly the same interpretation.
What you hear in the reading and the credits
The reading of the letter uses Morricone’s La lettera di Lincoln. The accompaniment allows an emotional shift after the violence, but it does not make the letter true or absolve the men who hear it. The viewer knows that Warren had already recognized it as false. The music works 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 support 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 falsehood still has consequences.
Roy Orbison’s entry in the credits opens another register. There Won’t Be Many Coming Home preserves a horizon of loss that speaks to the story’s outcome. Its presence should not be projected backward 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 end of the story.
The score and musical selection of The Hateful Eightis easier to understand 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 you are looking for and, above all, to recognize three ways music relates to violence: drawing close to a victim, sustaining a shared fiction, and saying goodbye to a world from which only a few survivors remain.
Back to the The Hateful Eight guide.