A fleeting glance in the rearview mirror revealed John Carpenter‘s past catching up with him … literally. It was 2016 in Athens, Greece. Carpenter, the influential writer, director, and musician, had just finished a performance of eerie, keyboard-driven themes he’d composed for his movies Halloween, Escape From New York, and The Fog, as well as original darkwave instrumentals with his “band” — his son Cody and godson, Daniel Davies — when dull headlights cleaved through the darkness behind them along the roadway. The car gained on them steadily, eventually getting close enough to make out the model: an autumn-red 1958 Plymouth Fury — same as the titular vicious vehicle from Carpenter’s 1982 Stephen King adaptation, Christine.
“We were running for our lives,” Carpenter, 78, recalls, sounding bemused. “We didn’t know whether he’s friend or foe.” The filmmaker, dressed in navy blue and sporting a snowy Fu Manchu, is seated between his son and Davies for a Zoom interview from his L.A. home. He speaks in a sort of folksy deadpan and often gives curtly noncommittal answers (“Sure” or “Don’t let’s talk about it”), but he becomes animated when describing the confrontation with this menacing driver, who apparently was a zealous fan.
“He finally pulls up and stops, and I say, ‘Dude, don’t do this,'” Carpenter says. “He didn’t realize we might think it was a dangerous thing for [him to chase us like that]. The guy had thought, ‘Oh, it’d be funny to do this. They’d like it.’ He was a nice guy, but he was an idiot at the same time.”
Such is the legacy of John Carpenter, the patron saint of slasher flicks, who has embraced the title of horror master in recent years. Nearly half a century ago, he reinvented the genre with Halloween (1978), which made Michael Myers the platonic ideal for masked movie killers, and it’s never been the same since. Even when he crossed genres into action (Assault on Precinct 13, Big Trouble in Little China), sci-fi (The Thing, Starman), and musical biopic (a made-for-TV Elvis Presley movie in 1979), his work always maintained a signature feel — an ineffable sense of tension and release with tight action and agoraphobic wide shots.
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“No matter what movies he did, you could look at them and tell it’s a John Carpenter film,” Kurt Russell, star of The Thing, Escape From New York, and several other Carpenter films, says. “There’s only a few directors you can say that about.”
ALTHOUGH CARPENTER HASN’T directed a movie since 2010’s The Ward, he’s still deep in the horror world. And just this week, he released a double feature of sorts: a grisly graphic novel and attendant soundtrack album, both titled Cathedral.
He based the comic off of a vivid dream he’d had, a storytelling first for him, in which he descended by elevator through Dantean infernos beneath a church to battle a demon. For the novel, he tidied up the story, focusing it on a woman named Christina avenging the death of her father, who the demon had eviscerated. (“I’m probably the girl [in the story],” he says. “Either that or I was the creature, the lord of the underground. I might have been him.”)
The accompanying soundtrack continues the icy, synth-driven sound he began with his own scores in the Seventies and has been developing on a series of albums since the band’s first release, 2015’s Lost Themes. This time, though, there’s more heavy metal influence — more guitar, more drums, more church organ, more attitude — to complement Cathedral’s grim tale. He hopes people will listen to the album while reading the comic.
“These albums brought a second career to my life,” Carpenter says of his work in the musical trio, which goes simply by Carpenter’s name. “Now that we’re putting out albums and touring, it’s joyous. It’s much less tension and pressure than directing a movie.”
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That said, Carpenter initially considered developing Cathedral as a film. He and Davies were even batting around ideas for actors who could star. But Carpenter opted for the more affordable path of making a graphic novel. “If you said right now, ‘I have $200 million here, would you like to make a movie of this?’ I might say yes,” he says. Nobody did, so he accepted some hard truths: “It’s going to cost way over a hundred million, and I’m old and don’t want to work that hard,” he says. “And it’s much more fun to do music than it is to direct movies.”
The graphic novel’s publisher is Storm King Comics, the imprint run by Carpenter’s wife and longtime collaborator, Sandy King. She latched onto her husband’s Cathedral dream because it had a linear story and he had the unusual idea of pairing it with an album. Although he claims that the comic-and-album release is the first of its kind, artists including Alice Cooper, Wayne Shorter, and RZA have done so in the past. But they didn’t have King’s visual artists to bring it to life (one drew the upper world around the cathedral; another drew the hell beneath it) or a John Carpenter story to tell.
“There is something about the stories John either has written or chooses that makes you wonder who are you when you face the horror,” King says. “I think that’s what’s unique in everything he does, whether it’s a comedy like Big Trouble in Little China or Starman, where [actress Karen Allen] has to face that this alien has taken the form of her dead husband, or [the Escape films’] Snake Plissken. They ask themselves, ‘Who are you?’ I think that question resonates in the Christina character [in Cathedral] as well: Who are you, and what are you willing to do when faced with having seen your father turned inside out like a piece of pulp? And what is this demon?” THOUGH CARPENTER’S PASSION for filmmaking may have waned, his enthusiasm for the music of Cathedral is palpable. He says he feels no connection to his greatest hits, written on synthesizers because it was “cheap and fast.” In fact, he’s charged Cody with playing the menacing 5/4 theme from Halloween — a rhythm Carpenter’s music-professor dad taught him — at concerts. “I don’t have an emotional attachment to it,” he says. “I’m much more emotionally attached to the new stuff, to Cathedral.”
Nevertheless, a cult has grown steadily in appreciation of Carpenter’s whole musical oeuvre. “Sit in a dark room and listen to the theme from Halloween and try not to piss your pants when suddenly someone puts a hand on your shoulder,” bestselling horror novelist Joe Hill says. (Hill, son of Stephen King, adds that Carpenter’s work inspired his first book, Heart-Shaped Box, and he imagined the director’s frequent collaborator Russell as the story’s main character, the death metal musician Judas Coyne.)
Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies, and John Carpenter (from left) have recorded several albums under the band name John Carpenter. Sophie Gransard* “The fact that John is a musician and comes from a family with a serious music background is really important to who John Carpenter is as a filmmaker,” Russell says. “I remember hearing that sound, a dead cross between a Western and a future sound, for Escape From New York and it was so clear [and] so distinct. And it was good. It was really good. Like, that’s Snake’s world.”
In 2019, when Rolling Stone polled horror-movie composers and aficionados to make a list of the greatest fright-flick music, Carpenter’s Halloween and Halloween III scores took the two top spots; Christine and Ennio Morricone’s The Thing scores also made the cut.
“When I first started releasing music professionally people would ask about Carpenter’s influence on me,” hip-hop producer El-P, half of Run the Jewels, says. “Those conversations actually made me go back and realize that he was making all of that sparse, sinister, growling, and mysterious music that snaked into my brain and made his films mean so much to me. Those tones and soundscapes with the nasty synth lines and drum machines became one of the building blocks of my production style.”
Former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangaltar, too, says Carpenter’s legacy is “immense” in cinema, electronic music, and pop culture in general. “To me, his influence on Daft Punk or some of my solo work seems now retrospectively palpable,” Bangaltar says, citing some of his own film scores and songs. “The dark, pulsating basslines in Tron: Legacy’s score, the twisted arpeggios and dissonant chords in the Irreversible original soundtrack, and the ominous brainwashing wordings behind the robot in the ‘Technologic’ music video.”
Carpenter began taking himself seriously as a musician a little over a decade ago, when he and Cody started futzing about on keyboards and Logic Pro between video games. King, ever watchful, hired a music attorney who inked her husband’s record deal. Davies soon got involved, and their early sketches became the songs on Lost Themes. The music recalled the angst and coldness of Carpenter’s movie scores but with more robust arrangements, buttressed by Davies’ guitar. The tracks were not just sketches, like most score albums, but complete songs.
Although Carpenter’s name is on the cover, the group says composing is a democratic process. “Our roles overlap, so it’s not one person doing all of one thing,” Cody says. “We all contribute to each other.”
They’ve continued releasing Lost Themes albums, with sequels arriving in 2016, 2021, and 2024, but the real surprise of Carpenter’s career came when he and his bandmates agreed to score Halloween, David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot of the bruised and bloodied Michael Myers franchise, which now comprises 13 films. (Carpenter directed only one of them.)
They scored Green’s sequels, too, as well as filmmaker Keith Thomas’ 2022 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, Firestarter — a movie Carpenter might have directed himself in the Eighties if The Thing, now considered one of the greatest movies of all time, hadn’t underperformed at the box office. (“Them’s the breaks,” he says of that fallout.)
Those soundtrack albums are the closest Carpenter has come to the moviemaking business in the past 16 years. In Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last picture, and unfortunately The Ward bombed. Over the course of two interviews, Carpenter says repeatedly that he has not closed the door on filmmaking but that the most arduous task is getting a movie funded.
At one point, I ask if he would consider making a Cathedral film with AI to save money. “If somebody came along and asked me [to make an AI movie], I would certainly consider it,” he says. “I’m not going to say no to anything. But sure, I have mixed feelings about AI.” Later, he notes that he’s impressed by how real things look in some of the AI-generated films he’s seen. So would he make a movie like that? “Sure, I would,” he says, adding, “You got some money?”
Carpenter says he’s “come very close” to making another film but “it keeps coming and going, and there’s one reason or another I haven’t.” Still, he scoffs at the notion he could feel any bitterness towards the movie industry, which has burned him multiple times.
Has he always been so Zen? “Oh, hell no,” he says gruffly. “I’m older now. I haven’t always been like this. You get calmer and wiser in old age.”
These days, he likes playing video games, watching basketball, and reading the news. He does not like watching his own movies. “Occasionally, I’ll turn on the TV and there they are, and it’s like, ‘Oh, come on, man. What was I thinking?'” he says. Though he admits he’s fond of The Thing and Halloween.
Carpenter on the set of Starman in 1984. © Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection “He’s not a nostalgia act,” King says. “The worst thing is when fans go, ‘But why don’t you make another Halloween?’ Well, fuck Halloween. How many of them do you need?”
THE SECOND TIME Carpenter and I speak, he is alone and watching the Knicks’ victory celebration on TV. His love of basketball far supersedes his love of self-promotion, so he often interrupts my questions to narrate the action of the parade taking place a few miles south of Rolling Stone’s New York headquarters (“There’s more pictures of your team here and confetti following, and New Yorkers raising their fists, and screaming and going nuts”). Similarly, during a 2018 Rolling Stone interview, he was more interested in balking at the Brett Kavanagh hearing on TV than discussing his soundtrack for the Halloween reboot. But it all seems part of his process, since current events have occasionally fueled his ideas.
He recalls how They Live (1988), in which a hapless construction worker (Roddy Piper) discovers that the government is run by aliens hellbent on dividing the rich from the poor, was inspired by observing Reaganomics at work. “You have to understand something about They Live,” he says. “That was a documentary. It’s still going on right now. It’s never changed.”
But the most prescient films he made were Escape From New York (1981) and its sequel, Escape From L.A. (1996), in which people live in a fascist state. In one scene in Escape From L.A., a character explains why she’s in jail: “I was a Muslim in South Dakota. All of a sudden they made it a crime.”
“Well, fascism is alive and well everywhere, I think, to my shock,” Carpenter says today. Then he adds, “But the Escape From New York scenario did not come true, so you guys can rest easy.” He shifts his attention back to the TV. “Down the avenue of champions is your basketball team today, so they haven’t taken that away from you yet.”
With so many possible storylines swirling about in the world, maybe Carpenter will find the right combination of a unique narrative, like Cathedral, and an investor with the millions needed to turn the idea into a movie. King says there’s a Carpenter-tied Amazon TV series in the works that will be announced at a later date. But Carpenter doesn’t want to talk about anything specific.
“We’re working on a new album and a new adventure,” he says. “This time, it’s not a dream, and I can’t tell you any more than that.”
Will it be a graphic novel? “I’m not going to tell you,” he says. “It might be.”
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Will the music be heavy metal? “I’m not going to tell you that, either.”
And with that, Carpenter stands up and moves to another room where he can watch the parade in peace.
