John Carpenter picks the 10 greatest movie soundtracks
John Carpenter has carved out a significant legacy not only as a filmmaker but also as a musician. His distinctive synth-driven soundtracks, often composed for his own films, have become iconic in the realm of horror and science fiction. Even outside of his filmmaking career, Carpenter has continued to release music, showcasing his talent and versatility beyond the silver screen.
It’s been almost a decade and a half since he last helmed a feature, but his musical tendencies remain undimmed. The thought of returning to the bright lights and high-pressure environment of a movie set doesn’t hold much appeal for the veteran these days, but the same can’t be said about his proclivities in the recording booth.
Since The Ward was released to an overwhelming sense of apathy in 2010, Carpenter has kept himself busy by contributing to the soundtracks of David Gordon Green’s rebooted Halloween trilogy and the derided Stephen King remake Firestarter while releasing several studio albums of his own.
The Lost Themes collection is four instalments and a remix record deep so far, but as of yet he’s shown no inclinations towards reuniting The Coup De Villes, his short-lived synth band where he was the lead vocalist and bass guitarist alongside keyboardist/Michael Myers actor Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace on lead guitar. They released one EP, tossed a song into Big Trouble in Little China, and then vanished into the ether, never to be seen or heard from again.
His tendencies may have lay with horror, thriller, and fantasy during a vaunted stint as a megaphone-wielding menace that yielded such greats as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, The Thing, They Live, and many more, but in terms of his own favourite soundtracks listed to DMY, Carpenter broadens his horizons to include genres that he’s never been one to dabble in.
That being said, he is a lifelong fan of the western genre and injected some of its sensibilities into many of his own works, with Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo winning praise for how “the tension themes are great”. In his view, Elmer Bernstein’s orchestral accompaniments to The Magnificent Seven “became standard fare for scoring westerns”, but there’s one composer who clearly stands out as the top dog.
It sounds scarcely believable, but Bernard Herrmann only ever won a single Academy Award for reinventing the face of feature film music, and it didn’t even come with one of his famed collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, either. Instead, The Devil and Daniel Webster bestowed him with his solitary Oscar, but that doesn’t make Carpenter’s cut.
He opts for the “dark, haunting score” of Vertigo, the “funny and suspenseful” overtures of North by Northwest, and the far-flung fantasies of Journey to the Center of the Earth, in the case of the latter for the way the opening theme “goes as low and as dark as possible” to create an increasing sense of dread.
Continuing in his inadvertent theme of Bernard established dominance over his musical tastes, James Bernard was at his “creeping, crawling, spine-tingling best” on 1955’s The Quartermass Experiment, with Christopher Lee’s Horrors of Dracula gaining points for the way the composer “used to sing the title of the movie he was scoring”.
Forbidden Planet evidently holds much sway over Carpenter on account of being both “weird and haunting” and “the first electronic score for a movie,” something that would go on to be replicated through his own work, with the brutal thriller Straw Dogs using its music “to express the character’s inner turmoil and conflicts”.
William Friedkin’s cult classic Sorcerer is deemed “the literal heart of darkness” thanks to Tangerine Dream’s evocative score, and it’s easy to see how all of the above made their own mark on Carpenter. The man loves synths, he loves the fantastical, and he loves using cues to ratchet up the tension, with all ten of his curated picks casting a shadow that the ‘Master of Horror’ embraced and used to his advantage.
John Carpenter’s favourite soundtracks:
- Vertigo (Bernard Hermann, 1958)
- North by Northwest (Bernard Hermann, 1959)
- Rio Bravo (Dimitri Tiomkin, 1959)
- The Quartermass Experiment (James Bernard, 1955)
- Forbidden Planet (Louis Barron and Bebe Barron, 1956)
- Sorcerer (Tangerine Dream, 1977)
- Straw Dogs (Jerry Fielding, 1971)
- Journey to the Center of the Earth (Bernard Hermann, 1959)
- Horror of Dracula (James Bernard, 1958)
- The Magnificent Seven (Elmer Bernstein, 1960)
