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Happy All Hallows Eve! I’m Jacob Braybrooke, and I’m wishing you a spook-tacular season with a two-part spread of new posts where we compare the work of John Carpenter’s music for the original 1978 version of ‘Halloween’ and the recent 2018 rebooted edition, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Born in Carthage, New York – John Carpenter is an American film director, composer and producer who is known for films like ‘Dark Star’ (1974), ‘The Thing’ (1982), ‘Big Trouble In Little China’ (1986) and ‘Vampires’ (1998), with the latter earning him a Saturn Award for ‘Best Music’. His films range between cult classics and commercial successes, but he was given the Golden Coach Award by the French Directors’ Guild in 2019 at the Cannes Film Festival for his overall contributions to cinema as an art form. Carpenter also holds a Commercial Pilot’s Licence and he has appeared in many of his own films as a pilot with a rotorcraft helicopter in cameo roles. None of his movies arguably scream seminal quite like his famous 1978 horror film, ‘Halloween’, which was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library Of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” in 2006. It remains to be one of the most profitable Indie films of all-time following its release way back in 1978, and it has grossed over $70m globally. The success of ‘Halloween’ kicked off a long line of Alfred Hitchcock-inspired Slasher flicks, and it has spawned a media franchise of sequels, remakes, reboots, novelizations, comic books and video games in the years to follow. The plot of the film follows the events of mental asylum patient Michael Myers, who was committed to a sanitarium for murdering his babysitting teenage sister on Halloween night – October 31st – when he was six years old. Fifteen years later, he’s on the loose and he escapes to his hometown, where he stalks a female babysitter (Laurie Strode, played by the very famous actress Jamie Lee Curtis), while being pursued by his Psychiatrist. It sounds like terrifying stuff – although I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of the original film and the 2018 reboot, which we’ll be discussing to see what has changed (or not) tomorrow in musical terms. We’re going to listen to the music that plays in the opening scene where Michael kills his sister Judith, the catalyst for all of the stories that followed, from the original soundtrack released in 1979 in Japan, and 1983 in the USA. Grab your Pumpkin Spiced Latte and get in the seasonal spirit below.

‘Halloween Kills’ is the latest film in the series, which is showing in cinemas now. In terms of the original soundtrack, however, it was originally falsely credited to the Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra because one of the film’s producers felt that it wouldn’t be taken seriously if credited to Carpenter honestly. However, the harsh Synth theme of the film seems more famous than the film itself in some ways, and so the joke’s on them. Carpenter also states in several interviews that his father was a music professor who taught him to play a drum beat on the Bongo’s in a 5/4 time signature when he was a child, and that was the key inspiration behind the notable, abrasive Synth chords in the film that run throughout the score. I’ve included the scene where ‘Michael Kills Judith’ is used in the film for your reference, and a plain text background featuring the music itself above, just for your preference of reference! Anyways, it is easy to see that Carpenter wanted to capture a very seriously murky and uneasy atmosphere for his score, and he packs a lot of minimalist suspense material that basically acts as a recapitulation of the same eerie Synth motifs of the ongoing music into the scene. He doesn’t try to replicate a fake imitation of an orchestra playing the music, and he instead leans in to the unusual Drone sounds of the spacious instrumentation that he uses quite scarcely. The Synths are piercing and unpleasant as the original Synth sections from the original theme music keep replaying, but the opening music of the scene is not beat driven at all, and the chords and melody is barely existent. Instead, we get a slow and plodding build to some jump scare-ish like rhythms as the ghostly Piano music uses its few melodies to key effect and flutter beneath the long, Drone sequences of Ambient production. The sound quality is very good, but the patterns are irregular and they create a sense of ‘unearth’ and discomfort when you listen to it since there’s no emphasis on consistent hooks or very frequent patterns. However, there’s a slight glistening effect of the Synths at the start that could lull you into a sense of security that later proves to be false. In conclusion, this is a great part of the official soundtrack because it creates the atmosphere of inevitable stabbing and subtle tone changes to complement the horrific visuals of the movie scene while using elements of Drone music and Ambient classical music to create abnormality and uncanny emotions for the listener through the uneven instrumental patterns that are difficult to predict. It doesn’t necessarily frighten me or even scare me, but it manages to put me on edge a little bit since it prepares me for the dark and occasionally Gothic, yet coherent material of the movie.

That’s all for now! As mentioned, we’ll be comparing and contrasting the soundtracks of two of the more popular ‘Halloween’ films over the weekend, and it continues tomorrow when we listen to something from the more contemporary reboot of the series from 2018, which broke prior box office records held by ‘Scream’ on its release.

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