#MELODY HALLOWEEN SPECIAL MOVIE#
“There is a point in making a movie when you experience the final result,” he writes on his site. He says the rhythm of Halloween’s main title theme was inspired by an exercise his father taught him on the bongos in 1961, the beating out of 5/4 time.ĮARN YOUR MASTER’S DEGREE IN FILM SCORING FROM BERKLEE ONLINE I was the fastest and cheapest I could get.”Ĭarpenter has said that his biggest influences as a composer were Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann, the latter of whom is best known for his score for Psycho, which is the film that inspired Halloween. I then became determined to ‘save it with the music.’ I had composed and performed the musical scores for my first two features, Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13, as well as many student films.
I screened the final cut minus sound effects and music, for a young executive from 20th Century Fox. “ Halloween was written in approximately 10 days by Debra Hill and myself. On his website, Carpenter tells the story of composing for the film: John Carpenter, left, with technologist Alan Howarth at Pi West Studio It’s amazing, the score works so well and really captures the horribly frightening vibe perfectly. They played and recorded the music to a click and a stopwatch, then matched it up with the film later on the 35 mm mag stock at the film studio. The challenge was that they had to record the music without synchronizing it to picture since the technology had not been invented yet. He then booked a studio in LA and connected with Dan Wyman-and eventually engineer Alan Howarth-to help him realize the soundtrack with synthesizers. Carpenter had studied music as a kid and played in bands. There weren’t enough funds to pay a film composer, let alone an orchestra. Halloween was a low-budget film, which cost around $300,000. The late 1970s were a pivotal time for electronic music in the soundtrack format, and music like this was previously the domain of science fiction, but Carpenter discovered that the new electronic sounds lent themselves well to the horror genre. The music from the 1978 film Halloween was revolutionary, not just because director John Carpenter also composed the score, but because of Carpenter’s adventurous use of early synth pads and stabs, which helped him create one of the most powerful and creepiest soundtracks of all time. The following is excerpted from the Berklee Online course Synthesis, Sampling, and Sound Design in Film Scoring: Electronic and Textural Resources.
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