John Carpenter on the ‘Elaborate’ Dream That Inspired His First Graphic Novel & Its Heavy Metal Soundtrack: ‘It’s Unbelievable’
Categoria: Musica
Cathedral is the first audio-visual project from the horror icon in years.
Por Billboard | 07/08/2026
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?