John Carpenter names the musicians who influenced him the most: “Part of my musical language”
Now that it’s become abundantly clear that he’s retired as a director, John Carpenter has all the time in the world to indulge his other two loves: music and video games.
The horror legend hasn’t helmed a feature since 2010’s The Ward, and while the movie is so terrible it’ll be an unfortunate footnote on a stellar career, Carpenter is open and honest enough to admit that his passion for filmmaking had been gradually escaping him for years beforehand.
His peak represented one of the hottest and most fertile creative periods any auteur has ever embarked on after he conspired to gift the world with Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China within a ten-year stretch, but he never managed to recapture that sustained magic.
Unless something drastic changes, his final slew of flicks will be The Ward, Ghosts of Mars, and Vampires, which is an unfortunate way to bring the curtain down on a filmography stacked full of classics and cult gems. On the plus side, he’s been using his increase in downtime to not only hone his gaming skills but continue crafting atmospheric soundtracks.
His short-lived foray into the world of being a recording artist saw him release a solitary EP as part of synth-rockers The Coup de Villes, but his tastes are much wider-ranging than that. Carpenter has a deep knowledge of cinematic soundtracks, and he’s cherry-picked elements of his favourites to inform his own contributions to the soundscapes of not only his own films but also the Lost Themes album series and other movies like David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy and the Firestarter remake.
There’s no set style Carpenter has adhered to when composing or performing, which makes sense based on the unusual set of inspirations he rattled off to The Skinny. “Musically speaking, it would be my father,” he explained. “He was a music professor, so he introduced me to classical music at a young age.”
From there, Carpenter “came to appreciate some of the great scores of the ’50s” from composers like Bernard Hermann and Dimitri Tomkin, but his love of rock and roll wouldn’t be forgotten, either. “I also found influence in The Beatles and Rolling Stones,” he said. “Both classical music and rock and roll are part of my musical language, which is riff-driven.”
Take a dash of knowledgeable academic Howard Ralph Carpenter, sprinkle it with the influence of the composers behind the scores for several of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable musical accompaniments and the 22-time Academy Award-nominated western veteran who cued up High Noon, Gunfight at the OK Corral and Carpenter’s favourite western Rio Bravo, and sprinkle it with the riffs hailing from the two biggest rock band of their era from either side of the pond, and that’s what he wanted to be as a musician.
Did he succeed? That’s entirely in the eye of the beholder, but he’s certainly given it a shot.
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