John Carpenter is one of the most iconic and formative names in all of horror from across the last six decades. The filmmaker is responsible not only for a genuinely insane run of monolithic genre films from across the years (Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Somebody’s Watching Me!, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, They Live, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, Escape from L.A., and beyond) but has also had a tremendously palpable influence on multiple generations of filmmakers in the years since.
In recent years, Carpenter has predominantly stepped away from his work as a filmmaker, instead opting to embrace his more musical sensibilities. The filmmaker has long since been creating the musical scores for his own films, something that he initially chalked up to a simple cost-saving measure. In the process, though, he just so happened to create some of the most timeless horror scores of all time, such as his synth-laden title theme for Halloween, which continues to endure to this day. Now, Carpenter and his collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies continue to make new albums, tour, and deliver musical scores for new films, such as David Gordon Green’s Halloween sequel trilogy or Bong Joon Ho’s upcoming horror film.
But now, a new release seems to have found the best of both worlds for modern-day Carpenter, allowing the iconic creator to blend his love of gothic horror storytelling with his passion for crafting expansive soundscapes. The new release is Cathedral, a graphic novel and concept album from the legendary master of horror and his collaborators. The graphic novel and album alike have received glowing reviews from fans and critics.
The Cathedral graphic novel is Carpenter’s first-ever venture into the world of such literature. It is a narrative collaboration between him, Sandy King, and Sean Sobczak and fleshes out a vivid nightmare that the director once had: that he walked into an abandoned church in LA and found it to have a derelict elevator that led straight to Hell. If that story sounds precisely up Carpenter’s alley, that’s because it is. Both aesthetically and narratively, the project feels cut from the same cloth as Carpenter films such as Assault on Precinct 13 and Prince of Darkness in immensely satisfying ways.
The Cathedral album, released alongside the graphic novel, sees Carpenter and his musical collaborators leaning into a more muscular, guitar-driven sound than one might traditionally associate with Carpenter’s sound but utilizing it to interrogate the more synth-driven melodic lines in utterly fascinating fashion. The sum total of the multimedia experience is the closest horror fans have come to getting a new John Carpenter film since 2009’s The Ward (underrated, by the way), and it is stellar.
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