The only thing that brings John Carpenter “closer to God” than cinema
If you were to pick a single song to soundtrack the life of director-composer extraordinaire John Carpenter, then one that springs instantly to mind is ‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’ by Super Furry Animals.
For decades, Carpenter has said and done whatever he likes, resolutely following his own path through Hollywood, and rather like the Super Furries, has been critically acclaimed over a long career, occasionally courting mainstream success while creatively refusing to pander to anyone’s more commercial wishes.
He is not a man to be trifled with, as even in the late 1970s, while some of his directing peers were busy becoming the biggest, most lucrative names in the industry, Carpenter steadfastly refused to fall in line and throw compliments at them, dismissing Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as ‘pretentious’, revealing his dislike of most if not all of Brian De Palma’s films and describing the feted Robert Altman’s work as ‘masturbatory’.
Carpenter is truly someone who marches to the beat of his own drum, that particular drum often being a synthesised one, as his is such a singular vision that he doesn’t even trust anyone to do the music for his films, instead showing that if you want a job done right, then the best way is sometimes just to do it yourself.
Although there have been other directors who have scored their own movies, none have done it to the degree Carpenter has, creating genuinely iconic themes for his films like his breakthrough hit, 1978’s Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 two years earlier.
Although he very rarely directs movies, having helmed just two this century, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars and 2010’s The Ward, making music is something he refuses to leave behind, co-composing soundtracks to the more recent Halloween sequels and this year releasing an album of music to go alongside a graphic novel called Cathedral. “People are begging me to stop”, he told The New Statesman.
While he is famously reticent to go along with the masses when it comes to praising even some of the most loved films of recent times, describing Christoper Nolan’s Oppenheimer as just ‘OK’ for instance, he is far more effusive about music, saying: “Music is an entirely different art form than the movies. It is older and ancient, but it is also, how can I put this, closer to God. It is the one thing that lifts us up from this slime. And you don’t have to talk about it, you can just hear it. Music is instantaneous.”
Part of the reason Carpenter directed far fewer movies once he moved past his most successful period, where in just a ten-year stretch he made They Live, Escape From New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China and Halloween, is that he decided to pursue a standalone music career, as a champion of synths and thanks to a love of rhythm that he inherited from his bongo-playing father.
He recorded and toured extensively, sometimes with his sons and backing members of Jack Black’s Tenacious D, all the way up until the 2010s when he released four volumes of instrumental, non-movie work titled Lost Themes. This year, he is also helping out with producing a video game version of Halloween, a first adaptation of which was released on Atari back in 1983.
