John Carpenter on the ‘Elaborate’ Dream That Inspired His First Graphic Novel & Its Heavy Metal Soundtrack: ‘It’s Unbelievable — Billboard

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John Carpenter on the ‘Elaborate’ Dream That Inspired His First Graphic Novel & Its Heavy Metal Soundtrack: ‘It’s Unbelievable — Billboard | AIPROPX

It’s been 16 years since the last John Carpenter-directed film, and 25 years since the wildly influential multihyphenate crafted a soundtrack to accompany one of his own visual projects. That changes this week with Cathedral , which arrived Tuesday (Aug. 4) as a graphic novel and Friday (Aug. 7) as a soundtrack album.

Inspired by a weirdly detailed nightmare Carpenter had a few years ago, John Carpenter’s Cathedral follows three police investigators as they descend into a demonic underworld, seeking answers for the grisly murder of a cop in an abandoned church.

To accompany his debut graphic novel (the first new visual project from the legendary director since his 2010 film The Ward ), Carpenter hit the studio with his longtime musical collaborators Cody Carpenter (his son) and Daniel Davies (his godson). Where the trio’s previous work (four installments of the acclaimed Lost Themes series as well as soundtracks for four films by other directors) was often eerie and minimalist, the Cathedral album goes hard, finding Carpenter, Carpenter and Davies churning out hammer-of-the-gods heavy metal riffs to accompany the hellishly vivid imagery of the book.

Created in collaboration with Sandy King (his wife, longtime creative partner and the founder of publisher Storm King Comics) and writer Sean Sobczak — with illustrations by Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna, coloring by Sian Mandrake and lettering by Marshall Dillon — the graphic novel stands on its own as a harrowing narrative. But thanks to the Cathedral album (out on Sacred Bones Records), the project becomes an engrossing audio-visual experience – and provides fans of the horror icon with the closest thing to a new John Carpenter movie we’ve had in years.

Billboard spoke with John Carpenter and Daniel Davies (the latter of whom fittingly stood in front of a Gothic cathedral in Brussels during the Zoom call) to learn about the project’s oneiric origins, whether Carpenter considers himself a metalhead and what life is like for the legend these days.

John, I gather this concept came to you in a dream. Are your dreams always so terrifying?

John Carpenter : No, they’re not. This is just a narrative dream, which I don’t really have much. I usually have frustration dreams — I’m trying to direct, and no one will listen to me, and time is running out. I’m lost somewhere. But this dream was really elaborate, and it was a story borrowed heavily from Greek mythology, but a story nonetheless. I was amazed at it when I woke up, and I told Daniel and Cody and we decided to do an album.

What did you think of the dream when you first heard about it, Daniel?

Davies : Like John said, it was so vivid, and it just seemed like, “We have to do music for this.” As it evolved, when John told us the story, those images evoked a certain feeling and made us think of a certain sound. We just went with that, and it evolved from there.

So at what point did the graphic novel element come in?

Davies : That came later. John had this outline of the story, and that’s where we started the songwriting, based on that outline.

Carpenter : It started as an idea in my mind to do a graphic novel because my wife is the editor and publisher of a comic company [Storm King Comics]. So I thought, well, maybe we can do that. It came after the album was done — it was last year, basically, when they started writing. My wife Sandy [King] and Sean [Sobczak] fleshed out a lot of the characterizations and a lot of the situations — more than I had, because I basically had just an outline. The graphic novel is in more depth.

The album is a bit harder, rock-wise, than some of the stuff you’ve done before. Did it start out with that heavy metal vibe?

Davies : As John was describing these sequences in the story, it just seemed like it would lend itself to heavy guitars and big drums and choirs. Everything we do is based on feel, and it just felt right. We each bring in different sketches for different scenes and then work on them all together. It was all based on the story. The story led us down this path of a more heavy rock album.

Do you just improvise, and then afterward figure out, “OK, we have a song here”?

Davies : Yeah, kind of. Like on “Lord of the Underground,” John would say, “Hey, we need a heavy riff for this main sequence in the story, where there’s a battle with the main character and this demonlike figure.” Then he’d sketch out a little riff, and we’d build it from there.

The metal connection makes sense too, because it’s a cathedral, and there’s so much Catholic imagery that seems metal in a way. Statues of flayed saints, that kind of thing.

Carpenter : I guess it does.

In terms of music tastes, are either of you big metalheads, or is it just part of the palette of music that you listen to?

Carpenter : It’s part of the rich pageantry of humanity that passes by, and some of it is metal. I love Metallica. [The Black Album] is probably a high for me. I’m not overly crazed on metal. I don’t know about you, Daniel — would you describe yourself as a metalhead?

Davies : No, but like you’re saying, it’s just one of many types of music that I love. I don’t think about music in terms of categories — does it move me, and I go with it. We love Goblin, Metallica, Diamond Head, Ennio Morricone. It doesn’t matter. It’s just how you put the music together that gives it that heavy feel.

What was the graphic novel creation process like? How much of the storyboarding are you controlling as you go through this, if any of it?

Carpenter : I wrote an outline, and the outline guided Sandy and Sean. They would sit over one side of the room and go through the outline and flesh it out — work on the characterization, the action — and I would sit across from them playing video games and listening and pipe up when something I thought was...