Two years ago, an unsettling image came to John Carpenter in his sleep. It consisted of an abandoned cathedral with a pair of elevators inside, capable of plunging passengers to unknowable depths.
For most people, that late-night tableau would qualify as a nightmare. But to Carpenter, it was simply an inspiring dream — the latest in a long line of terrifying visions that have marked this filmmaker’s career.
Carpenter has been a horror titan since 1978, when “Halloween” — the low-budget thriller he directed, co-wrote and scored — inaugurated the modern slasher genre. He followed that with more than a dozen feature films, many of them mixing sci-fi, action and social commentary, like the gory paranoia thriller “The Thing” (1982) and the Reagan-era alien-invasion flick “They Live” (1988).
Yet Carpenter, whose most recent feature film was released in 2010, had no interest in bringing those creepy elevators to the screen.
“Directing is too stressful,” he said in an interview in June while relaxing in his Hollywood office. It sits on a street dotted with picket-fenced homes, not unlike the cozy suburbias terrorized in “Halloween.” Dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black pants, his gray hair pulled back, Carpenter pointed to his 78-year-old face and smiled: “I didn’t look like this all the time. This is what happens when you direct. It’s like working in a coal mine.”
Rather than step back behind the camera, Carpenter adapted his eerie dream into “Cathedral,” a horror tale that takes the form of a graphic novel and a hard-rock album (the book was released Tuesday; the album comes out Friday). The comic, which Carpenter co-wrote with his wife, Sandy King, and Sean Sobczak, follows a group of Los Angeles police officers who venture into the bowels of an abandoned downtown church following a gruesome murder.
The fierce creatures and fantastical landscapes they encounter are reflected in the assaultive “Cathedral” soundtrack, which mixes crunching guitar riffs, relentlessly propulsive drums and icy synthesizers. Carpenter co-wrote and performed on the album’s 14 tracks with his go-to collaborators: His son, Cody Carpenter, 42, and his godson, Daniel Davies, 45, both multi-instrumentalists.
“My chops aren’t very good, and I don’t practice,” John Carpenter said. “So I’m carried along by these two. I just let them tell me what to do.”
His bandmates, seated nearby, objected in unison. They were gathered in the front room of Carpenter’s office, where a Michael Myers pinball machine and a giant statue of Nosferatu lurked in the corner.
“Cathedral” is the trio’s fifth studio album together in just over a decade. During that time, Carpenter has transitioned from horror auteur to professional rock-’n’-roller, known for his menacing instrumentals and spooky live shows.
It might seem like an unlikely creative-career switch. But it makes sense to Carpenter, who has been playing music his entire life. He grew up in Bowling Green, Ky., the son of a music professor who urged him to learn numerous instruments. Though Carpenter didn’t scare easily — he caught the 1957 film “The Curse of Frankenstein” in the theater when he was just 9 years old — the prospect of bringing a violin to his rural school filled him with dread.
“I was in the orchestra, and had to carry this tiny case,” recalled Carpenter. “I was a mark. These country boys were waiting to beat the [expletive] out of me. I wanted to get rid of that thing as soon as I could.”
As he got older, Carpenter discovered bands like the Doors and the Byrds. He eventually ditched the violin in favor of the guitar, and started playing covers. His music training came in handy when Carpenter relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, in order to study at the University of Southern California. That’s where he familiarized himself with modular synthesizers, which became a hallmark of his early soundtracks. For the bleak, low-budget 1976 action drama “Assault on Precinct 13,” Carpenter created a series of skittering, pulsating electronic tracks that were ominous without being overbearing.
Using synthesizers allowed Carpenter to save money and work fast. He composed the “Halloween” soundtrack in just three days, including the main theme: A rattling combination of haunting synthesizers and persistent piano notes, all played to a 5/4 time signature that Carpenter’s father had taught him on the bongos.
Over the next several decades, Carpenter composed music for nearly all of his films, often working with longtime collaborator Alan Howarth. For the 1987 supernatural thriller “Prince of Darkness,” the duo leaned on quietly menacing keyboard chimes and brief chord progressions.
“The music on ‘Prince of Darkness’ isn’t complicated,” said Kyle Dixon, one of the creators of the music for the Netflix hit “Stranger Things.” “But it’s brooding and spooky, with the bass thumping and melodies coming in and out. You know something weird’s going to happen.”
By the early 2010s, Carpenter was working on music at home, where he was often joined by his son and Davies. The three men have been playing together, either recreationally or professionally, for decades. Davies, the son of the Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, spent much of his adolescence living with the Carpenter family following his parents’ divorce. The Carpenter household was the kind of place where Steve Buscemi could be spotted playing drums during a wrap party, or where the British composer James Bernard might demonstrate how he wrote the score for the 1958 adaptation of “Dracula.”
“We would always talk about music and movies: ‘Why is this scene scary?’ ‘What is that moment really about?,’” recalled Daniel Davies, who got some early guitar lessons from Carpenter, learning tunes like the Byrds’ “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.”
As the younger musicians grew up, they bonded with the elder Carpenter about their favorite artists, from ABBA to the Bee Gees. “I learned everything from my dad,” Cody Carpenter said. “Growing up, he had all these instruments around the house, and he’d play all the music he loved for me.”
Their formal collaboration began when John and Cody started jamming in a basement studio, pausing at times to play video games. As recording progressed, they were joined by Davies, by then a veteran of such rock acts as Year Long Disaster and Karma to Burn.
Their recordings eventually found their way to Caleb Braaten, founder of the Brooklyn indie label Sacred Bones. “I was cautiously excited,” said Braaten, who grew up watching Carpenter films. “Electronic movie scores have become very important in the culture, and John is the master at that. But recent electronic music movements, like cold wave, also owe a huge debt to him.”
Carpenter’s first album with the label, “Lost Themes,” arrived in 2015; the next year, he and his group hit the road for nearly 40 live dates, playing new tunes, as well as some of his best-known film scores. “The very first show, I was scared,” Carpenter said. “And then, maybe 30 seconds into being up there, I thought, ‘This is the greatest. There’s nothing like this.’”
Carpenter doesn’t read or write music, instead relying on improvisation. Even when he’s in his home recording studio, he’s still very much directing: While writing music for “Cathedral,” he’d talk through the graphic novel’s story line in the studio, searching for sounds that fit the scenes in his head. “John would say something like, ‘OK, we’re going to have our main character fight the dark lord, so we need a heavy riff right here,’” Davies recalled. “And it starts coming out that way, based on the images that he’s describing to us.”
The resulting songs are some of the group’s most aggressive, owing to the three musicians’ shared love for Metallica. The stomping “Primeval” features gnarled guitar lines, while “Lord of the Underground” combines thrash-rock fury and ghostly synth lines.
“It’s a rock record, which is something that John’s been trying to unlock,” Braaten said. “And it’s thematic — there’s a story that goes with it. In a way, it’s like an actual score to a John Carpenter film.”
Carpenter’s latest musical effort arrives as his filmography is being discovered and championed by Gen Z and millennial movie fans. Even his more coolly received efforts now have die-hard followings: On the review site Letterboxd, his Lovecraft-ian tale “In The Mouth of Madness” — a commercial misfire back in 1994 — is now among his highest-rated movies. And last year, a multinight retrospective of his films in Los Angeles quickly sold out.
“Carpenter’s movies change their meaning over time,” said Alex Ross Perry, an indie writer-director and Carpenter admirer. “If you’re watching ‘The Thing’ or ‘They Live’ when you’re 13, they’re fun sci-fi thrillers. But if you’re watching them in your 30s or 40s, they’re deep and meaningful depictions of Cold War mentality and American conservatism.”
For Carpenter, who often found himself at odds with critics and studio heads alike, the increased attention is gratifying. “I’ve been called all sorts of names,” he said. “And I’ve had all sorts of bad reviews. And now? It’s fantastic.”
But even with a new wave of film fans, Carpenter’s enthusiasm is focused on music, “the greatest art form man invented,” he said. “Movies are complex and expensive. But with music, you don’t have to talk about it. You can just listen.”
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