New John Carpenter Music

The latest Halloween film cycle has been uneven, to be polite. 2018’s HALLOWEEN was a nice return to brutal form with fun nods to various past entries and unique approach to investigating generational trauma. 2021’s HALLOWEEN KILLS…wasn’t that. It dialed up everything from the previous entry, for good and mostly ill, making all subtext blatant text and all of the winking references turned into loud screams of “REMEMBER THIS?!?!”

Having said that, one of the few constants across these new movies so far have been the scores by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies. While they dip back into the foreboding synths of Carpenter’s compositions, they add new sounds and instruments to tracks in a way that makes for a thrilling update that vastly overshadows their cinematic counterparts. With HALLOWEEN ENDS quickly approaching (releasing on October 14, 2022) to allegedly end this trilogy while boasting a huge question mark over whether it will be any good, the musicians have released a new track from the upcoming film.

“The Procession” is familiar but also has those clever changes that make it sound like darker, more gothic (and more epic) versions of the music Carpenter did with Alan Howarth for PRINCE OF DARKNESS and HALLOWEEN II. The reverb on the piano pieces with the tinny creepiness of the synths and plodding percussion perfectly establishes a feeling of dread and unrelenting horror.

Hopefully the film itself can be worthy of this score.

You can listen to the track below, pre-order/pre-save the score on digital music providers (though be careful as Carpenter loves to name the tracks after spoilery plot stuff), and buy it on vinyl from Sacred Bones Records and Waxwork Records (though the vinyl won’t ship until January 2023).