Real talk: I hate scary movies, but I love scary movie soundtracks. Get the hell out of here with your bloody kitchen knives, and just give me the music that scales the bones of my spine with long, creepy fingernails. Between young composers like Mica Levi (Under The Skin) and Rich Vreeland as Disasterpeace (It Follows), there's been a renaissance of modern horror movie scores. But there is only one master of horror.
John Carpenter's scores for the first three Halloween films are fantastically phantasmagorical, slipping into that space between wonder and terror like spiked walls closing around your doom. For the month in which we all change our Twitter handles to something spooky (currently, I'm "Mars Attacks Gotrich"), Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have released a spectacular cover of the Halloween theme on Friday the 13th. It begins as a low, wind-whistling drone, but as the pin-prickled melody unfolds, the duo swarms the background with howling synths, building to a bludgeoning industrial rhythm. If there's ever another Halloween movie, can Reznor and Ross please score it?
John Carpenter's Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 comes out Oct. 20 on Sacred Bones Records. John Carpenter is on tour now.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
