Hear Horror Filmmaker John Carpenter’s Eerie New Song ‘The Dead Walk’

Filmmaker John Carpenter returns to his horror-movie roots on his new song “The Dead Walk.” Like the soundtracks he composed for his celebrated films like Halloween and The Fog, his keyboard does most of the heavy lifting with a plodding disco rhythm and an eerie, fuzzy, propulsive melody that leads to a tense, stomping march of electric guitar — all the makings of a zombie scene in a film. The track will appear on his upcoming album, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, due out February

As with Carpenter’s previous Lost Themes albums, he teamed with his son, Cody Carpenter, and his godson, Daniel Davies (son of the Kinks’ Dave Davies), for the music. “We begin with a theme, a bass line, a pad, something that sounds good and will lead us to the next layer,” John Carpenter said in a statement of how the musicians work together. “We then just keep adding on from there. We understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, how to communicate without words, and the process is easier now than it was in the beginning. We’ve matured.”

In addition to his Lost Themes LPs, Carpenter and his team created the soundtrack for the most recent Halloween reboot. He told Rolling Stone that he was happier with the 2018 score than he was with the original. “It’s better sonically in every way I could think of,” he said. “I wish I had this kind of technology back in the old days but when you’re a low-budget filmmaker, you have to go in there and get it done.”