'Halloween' Featurette Highlights John Carpenter's Incredible New Score
You can't have a Halloween movie without John Carpenter's iconic music. Thankfully, the new Halloween was smart and lucky enough to bring Carpenter back to compose a whole new score. A new Halloween featurette offers a little insight into Carpenter's new music, with the horror master himself talking about his approach to the film's haunting sound. Watch the Halloween featurette below.
Halloween Featurette
Not only is the new Halloween film good, it also features one of John Carpenter's very best scores. Carpenter hasn't made a film or handled a soundtrack in years, but he has been releasing his own original music in the form of his Lost Themes albums. When it came time to make the new Halloween, director David Gordon Green made sure Carpenter was involved with the film. "We had to have a John Carpenter score," Green says in this featurette.
The result: Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies came together and composed a killer score. "I got to play with the original themes of Halloween," John Carpenter says here. "Take the original score and modernize it with new sounds and new approaches." It would've been very easy for Carpenter to just recycle his original, immortal Halloween score. Instead, he's crafted something new, and exciting. A blend of the simplicity of the original music with a more modern, synthesized sound – and what a great sound it is. "We wanted to do was make a scary movie, and that's all we cared about," Carpenter says. "It is going to scare the shit out of you. I guarantee it."
In a separate interview, Carpenter went so far as to say he thinks the new score sounds much better than the original Halloween soundtrack:
"Well, we started by getting the themes from the original movie and moving them into the computer. Using new technology, we just brought them back to life — we put new life into it, really. The sounds that are available to us today, they're just so much more modern and so much better than the original stuff. I mean, even the audio quality of the sound is improved."
"It's certainly the foundation of this movie, is John's original theme. He's composing the music with his son, Cody, and Daniel Davies, so the three of them are working together," David Gordon Green added. "It's fun to be able to say, 'When do you want iconic and when do you want to be fresh and inventive?' So that's kind of the balance we're exploring right now. Hopefully he's doing that today."
Halloween opens October 19, 2018. You can listen to one of the tracks from the score, "The Shape Returns", below.
The Shape Returns