John Carpenter ‘Halloween Kills’ Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Review: John Carpenter and family reconvene for soundtrack to David Gordon Green’s follow-up to 2018 reboot of slasher classic.
John Carpenter may not be in the filmmaking business anymore, but he’s keeping busy with his composing duties. Earlier this year he released Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, his third album of non-film score material.
And now he returns with Halloween Kills, his score (collaborating again with son Cody and godson Daniel Davies) to David Gordon Greene’s sequel to his hit 2018 reboot of Carpenter’s original 1978 slasher classic (out October 15th on Sacred Bones Records).
And like that prior soundtrack to the 2018 film (also composed by Carpenter and family), Halloween Kills sees the trio expand, reshape (pun intended) and reinvigorate the minimalist template that made his original piano and synth score so iconically terrifying.
The film, once again, pits indestructible masked serial killer Michael Myers against Laurie Strode, the original final girl (once again played by Jamie Lee Curtis), and Carpenter and co. help reinforce what makes that dysfunctional duo so timeless.
The album opens with Logos Kill, a droning and slightly dreamy instrumental that suggests what a horror score by Brian Eno might sound like–inky and fuzzy around the edges, with dread slowly bubbling towards the surface.
Then comes the title theme, which again sticks with the haunting 5/4 piano motif that has become one of the most recognizable pieces of music in film history, but augmented with backing synths approximating a Goth vocal chorus ala The Sisters of Mercy’s This Corrosion.
Myers House replicates the track of the same name from Carpenter’s original score, but more full throated and less skeletal, while First Attack’s two note piano stab and frantically skittering beat is a variation of The Shape Lurks from the ’78 original score, and it’s dread personified, conjuring pure terror from musical economy.
But like the score from the 2018 Halloween, it’s the deviations and variations from the classic soundtrack that make for the most involving and memorable musical moments.
Take Let It Burn, a phantasmagorical nightmare of echoing warped voiced synths, or From The Fire, which combines an eerie opening synth drone not unlike Carpenter’s score to Escape From New York, but welded to metal guitars and industrial beats.
Cruel Intentions is particularly effective, a sonic collage with the relentless pace of a ticking click flecked with dirge-worthy piano and atmospheric dread, while the hypnotic thrum of Gather The Mob recalls the single Night off the first Lost Themes album.
Rampage lives up to its title: pure undistilled synthwave tension, and Hallway Madness takes it up another notch, with synths that snarl like feral dogs, and ping-ponging electronic squiggles with escalating perscussion that brings the procedings to a fever pitch, while Unkillable fuses a dancebeat with discordant electronic textures, a strident synth and guitar riff and terror to spare.
But the quieter moments also help add to the tension, from It Needs To Die’s eerie mix of clinking sound effects, distressed keyboards and mournful, plaintive piano, to Reflection, which deconstructs the classic title theme into something more sorrowful and lovely, and the layered Michael’s Legend, which is surprisingly moving and contemplative, with a music box like melody and melodramatic underpinnings.
While longtime Carpenter fans dream for the day when he’ll retake the director’s chair and fully revisit his groundbreaking horror classic, his score for Halloween Kills provides connective tissue which elevates Greene’s material and keeps things dead centered and focused as sharp as Michael Myers’ butcher knife.
Myers will never die, nor will the franchise or Carpenter’s haunting score, but Halloween Kills shows there’s still multiple ways to tweak a simple musical formula and offer a sinister variation on a theme(s).
