John Carpenter on his composing process, including the score to “Halloween”
Writer, director, musician and comic book creator John Carpenter is one of the most prominent names in the modern-day horror genre.
Among his eclectic filmography, Carpenter directed and co-wrote the landmark slasher film “Halloween” in 1978 with a $300,000 budget, which continues to fill theaters with sequels to this day. His other films include “The Fog,” “Christine,” “Escape from New York,” “The Thing,” “Big Trouble in Little China” and “They Live.” In addition to writing and directing, he writes and performs original compositions for the majority of his films. In recent years, he’s turned much of his artistic focus to original music, as seen in his albums “Lost Themes” and “Lost Themes 2.”
“American Masters: Creative Spark” producer, Joe Skinner, met with John Carpenter to discuss his eclectic career. In these highlights from that interview, Carpenter reveals his composing process, including his inspiration for the signature theme to “Halloween.”
Because so many of your movies seem to take place in L.A., I was hoping you could talk about L.A. a little bit and how that location is important to you.
John Carpenter: Well I came out to film school to USC to go to cinema school in 1968. John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles. I saw all these guys in film school. They all came down and spoke to us. There was Orson Welles; there was Howard Hawks in my class. Man that’s a great time. But I digress. L.A. It was like coming home. I should have been born here. I should have been raised here. This is my home. I love Los Angeles. We have it all. We’ve got ocean. We’ve got mountains. We’ve got snow if you go high enough. We’ve got lots of crime. We’ve got lots of pretty girls. We’ve got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there’s a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it’s always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.
Could you walk us through what your writing process is like for you when you’re writing these movie scores?
John Carpenter: Most of them are improvised on a synthesizer, primarily using a synthesizer. My musical career as a movie composer began in film school. In film school you have no money so you don’t have money for a composer or an orchestra. So you have to find a way to make music that sounds big or sounds big enough for your movie, and the way to do it is with a synthesizer. Because with a number of tracks in using a synth you can build up a sound that sounds like orchestra or like Switched-On Bach or you can sound like a scary movie or it’s like an action film. All sorts of things. So that’s where I began. And my first score was “Dark Star,” which I can’t even tell you what kind of synthesizer I use but it was really primitive, and then “Assault On Precinct 13” and “Halloween” and then I just began one after another doing the scores to my movies. The technology and synthesizers got better over the years. But basically it’s a keyboard and you can call up various sounds. I mean you can do it now on a computer by just punching in a program or in the old days in the tube synthesizer days they had to tune the synth, saw-tooth or whatever sound they wanted. So I of course know nothing about that so I had to get somebody to do it for me. And that’s where all my associations and working with other people came and they were they had to work the machines. I couldn’t. All I could do was sit down at a keyboard, say make it sound like a deep bass sound, they would, and I’d play and that was it. And in the beginning I would just play the music and then cut it in in various places. But as time went on, I began to play to the image to the movie, which is great.
What were some of the early reactions that people had to this music?
John Carpenter: Indifference, complete indifference. My first claim to fame was the theme to “Assault on Precinct 13.” Somebody in England did a cover recording of it and released it as a single and that was called “Can’t Beat the System,” I think it was called. God it was awful, awful. But, reaction was never much, you know, until later in my life people reflected on it.
How did the theme song to “Halloween” come about?
John Carpenter: My father bought me a pair of bongos for Christmas when I was 13 and he taught me five-four time, “pop pop pop.” So I thought that was clever. I sat down with the piano just one in “dun-dun-dun” and played octaves—that’s where it came about. I showed the movie to an executive without music, which is a big mistake. Don’t ever show a movie to anybody unless it’s completely done. And the executive said that’s not scary and I’m not scared by anything like that. And then you know the movie came out and it was with the music, it got scarier.
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