The Pale Blue Eye

I was REALLY excited to see The Pale Blue Eye – as the whole thing was shot around my hometown of Pittsburgh. Western PA is filled with well-preserved colonial sites that are located within state parks. Specifically, I spend a lot of time at McConnells Mill State Park — where the ice house, and murder #2 scenes were filmed.

The film follows detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) and a young Edgar Allen Poe as they work together to solve a pair of murders at the West Point Academy in 1830. It’s an inventive origin story of Edgar Allen Poe; deftly played by Harry Melling. You’ll remember him as the armless, legless man reciting “Ozymandias” in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The Pale Blue Eye was directed by Scott Cooper, who also filmed 2013’s, Out of the Furnace, with Christian Bale in Pittsburgh. One of my all time favorite films, Hostiles, is also directed by Scott Cooper, and stars — you guess it — Christian Bale.

The 1st and 3rd act of The Pale Blue Eye are excellent. The 2nd act is a bit monotonous — but carried by the expert casting, incredible performances, and the cinematography. I imagine a director forecasts, but can’t completely control how a film will turn out. If Scott Cooper had a do-over, I believe he would add a 3rd corpse. As macabre as this movie is, it needs just one more (2nd act) corpse for perfection. Lol!

The score, by the iconic composer Howard Shore (at once) channels gothic horror and a military trumpet. From the soundtrack, the pieces: West Point, Hospital Ward, and The Academy — have an elaborate note motif — that I used for my fingerstyle arrangement.

You might also like to play…

The Dark Knight Rises | fingerstyle guitar + TAB

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: The Book | fingerstyle guitar + TAB

Batman Begins: Eptesicus | fingerstyle guitar + TAB

How to play The Pale Blue Eye | fingerstyle guitar 

The guitar tab for this arrangement is beautifully written across 2 pages. I recommend it for beginner guitar players and up. It’s an excellent étude to work on playing (and reading) single note lines. For more short pieces like this, check out my 2 Minute Classical Guitar Archive.

Enjoy, the guitar tab is available below:

In accordance with the guitar tab, my song structure looks like this:

Verse 2x, Chorus

**The Pale Blue Eye (Netflix) | fingerstyle guitar

My tuning for this piece is (from low to high): C F C F A D. If you don’t want to tune that low, you can just as easily play it 1 whole step up: D G D G B E.