It’s been years since horror maestro John Carpenter picked up the pen or stepped behind the camera for a feature, but that doesn’t mean he’s been idle from work. To accompany his latest standalone album Lost Themes II, along with a current tour, a music video for Utopian Facade has been released. The penultimate song from the album, Facade is pure Carpenter, with thumping synths and electronic bells carrying swelling layers of dread that give way to one of the more hopeful melodies on the album. Carpenter is a self-taught master of synth scores, originally starting out when he had to score Assault on Precinct 13 on his own when the team ran out of money to pay for a composer. From there, Carpenter continued his growing aesthetic of electro-infused soundtracks with each of his films.
The video, directed by Gavin Hignight and Ben Verhulst, features a white-and-black-clad being as they venture through the dark wood and encounter mysterious foes. A use of time dilations and almost whimsical choreography gives the proceedings a dreamlike feeling, especially coupled with otherworldly rings of the synths.
Carpenter also recently sat down at the New York Film Academy for a Q&A session, where the subject of remakes were brought up. Specifically, a 2009 version derived from the director’s own 1978 game-changing slasher, Halloween. When asked how he felt about director Rom Zombie‘s take on the legend of horror icon Michael Myers, Carpenter had a few choice words:
Well, I would say nice things about him, but you know we did this — I thought it was gonna be a real cool deal for the History Channel, Biography channel, whatever that is, that they were gonna do about Halloween — I thought ooh, that’s pretty cool. Until I noticed that they did one on Caddyshack, and I thought oh, well *sighs*, what is this?
Anyway, they interviewed him on that Biography channel and he lied about me. He said I was very cold to him when he told me he was going to remake it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I said, ‘make it your own movie, man. You know? This is yours now. Don’t worry about me.’ I was incredibly supportive, [and] why that piece of shit lied, I don’t know. He had no reason to. Why did he do it?
So, frankly, that will color my response to the film. If I take that away, I did not…I thought that he took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much about the guy [Michael Myers]. I don’t care about that. It’s supposed to be a force of nature, he’s supposed to be almost supernatural. Knowing about that was…and he was too big! It wasn’t normal.
Interestingly, Rob Zombie spoke about his discussion with Carpenter back in 2007, and his take on it feels different than the one Carpenter apparently saw.
See the Utopian Facade video below, with a nod to Bloody Disgusting, and video of Carpenter’s recent Q&A.
What do you think of Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween?