Movies

Listen to John Carpenter’s Horror Theme for Shudder

by Kyle Anderson
Oct 29 2018 • 1:30 PM

At this point, we pretty much have one person to thank for the soundscape of horror. With the scores to his movies from 1978 to 1995 still among the best movie music ever made, John Carpenter‘s synthesizer and rock guitar music inspired a generation of composers for modern horror classics like It Follows and The Guest. His score for this year’s Halloween re-quel is among his best ever, and the genre is still benefiting from his influence 40 years later. No one knows this better than streaming service Shudder, which now has its very own theme song composed by Carpenter himself.

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This track (via EW) is absolutely vintage Carpenter, employing his trademark thumping, percussive bass tones and shrieking synthetic strings. Interestingly, it sounds a bit like the score to the 1982 film The Thing, which was one of his only movies he didn’t score himself, instead hiring legendary composer Ennio Morricone who turned in a very Carpenter-esque synth score.The track will be officially unveiled on Shudder as part of a free 24-hour marathon of Carpenter’s original Halloween on, fittingly, October 31. If you don’t have Shudder, you can still catch the marathon via their Shudder TV website here. Most of the time, you’ll only hear the five-second stinger version, which still manages to get in all the great bits.
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It wouldn’t be October without some good ol’ John Carpenter music playing in your speakers. For our money, the best of his scores are: Halloween, Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, and Halloween 2018. What’re your favorites? Let us know below!

Featured Image: Sacred Bones

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!