In its own way, John Carpenter’s chilling score from the 1978 Halloween defines this slasher cinema touchstone just as much as the mask of Michael Myers. So if the legendary composer and director wants to lend his talents once more to the series, then that’s a pretty big deal.
In the below featurette recently posted to YouTube, you can get a taste of Carpenter’s new soundtrack, which provides a modern twist on his original pieces from forty years ago. You can also hear a few thoughts from director David Gordon Green, co-writer Danny McBride, Carpenter himself, and his two collaborators, Daniel Davies and Cody Carpenter.
The video ends with the creator of this long-running horror property giving his seal of approval to the latest installment, saying:
“It is going to scare the shit out of you. I guarantee it.”
While Carpenter apparently likes the theme music of the first Halloween enough to make it his ringtone, the renowned filmmaker also relished the opportunity to rework his old music using present-day technology, telling Revolver:
“Well, we started by getting the themes from the original movie and moving them into the computer. Using new technology, we just brought them back to life — we put new life into it, really. The sounds that are available to us today, they’re just so much more modern and so much better than the original stuff. I mean, even the audio quality of the sound is improved.”
From the sound of things, Carpenter is pretty happy with how this new movie turned out, claiming shortly before the flick’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere that it’s the franchise’s best entry since the first one. Since then, the feature’s been released to mostly strong reviews, and is currently on course to do very well indeed at the box office. With such a promising pre-release buzz, it only figures that we’re already hearing reports of work beginning on a sequel.
You can see if the latest Halloween is as scary as Carpenter says it is when the film hits theaters on October 19th.
