You can call it narcissism; we’ll just call it good taste. At the San Diego Comic-Con, director David Gordon Green alleged that John Carpenter uses the classic theme music from the 1978 Halloween as his ringtone – a score that Carpenter just so happened to compose himself.
Of course, the legendary filmmaker’s recently been at work composing the score for Green’s upcoming Halloween, a sequel to the Carpenter-helmed original of the same name, but he clearly still has a soft spot for what’s arguably his best-known piece. In one of his first meetings with the director, Green recalls how their discussion was interrupted by the unexpected sound of eerie and ominous synths.
“In the middle of the meeting his phone went off and it was the theme from Halloween, and I almost lost it.”
Carpenter’s latest score featured in some intense new footage from the upcoming sequel which screened this weekend at SDCC and showed Michael Myers move from house to house on a murderous rampage. The clip has received rave reviews on social media, with a share of the praise going to the sequence’s unsettling soundtrack.
With the next Halloween disregarding everything from the series timeline since the 1978 original, Green recently recalled how Carpenter was initially suspicious when he was approached with the project, but was eventually convinced to give the film his seal of approval.
“Once we kind of had a concept of eliminating Halloween 2 and beyond, that’s when we went over to Carpenter’s house, which was a lovely picnic, and nervously presented our ideas to him. Through the course of that very suspicious conversation, [we] saw him go from cross-eyed to big smiles and then that gave us the confidence to move forward pretty quickly and then try to get Jamie Lee Curtis, [original star Nick Castle] and Carpenter himself to do the music. The next wave of ambition kicked in once we, as I like to say, we kissed the ring of the Godfather and he gave us the thumbs up.”
We’ll see if the final product can get the thumbs up from fans as well when Halloween arrives on October 19th.
