John Carpenter's Cathedral is a soundtrack for a graphic novel

John Carpenter has released Cathedral, a horror metal album built around the same nightmare that produced a graphic novel of the same name. The dream involved a cathedral in downtown Los Angeles with a hidden room, an elevator down to another hidden room, and a second elevator down again into a hellish underworld full of monsters. "It was so cinematic and vivid," Carpenter told SPIN. "I thought, 'I have to score this.'" He wrote the graphic novel and the album as companion pieces meant to be taken in together, though each is built to stand alone.

Carpenter directed Halloween and The Thing but hasn't made a film since 2010's The Ward. Since 2015 he has released four Lost Themes albums on Sacred Bones with his son Cody Carpenter on keyboards and godson Daniel Davies on guitar, the same pair who play on Cathedral. The new record leans further into metal than those releases did; Carpenter called it "kind of our first heavy metal album."

Carpenter has always carried a strain of prog through his scores, and leaned toward metal before in later films including Escape from L.A. and Ghosts of Mars, The Quietus noted, but Cathedral is his first outright horror metal record.

Even when Carpenter brought in Ennio Morricone to score The Thing in 1982, the veteran composer came up with something that still sounded like Carpenter's own work, SPIN noted. Cathedral's heavier turn toward electric guitar recalls a different touchstone: both SPIN and The Quietus compared it to Goblin's scores for Dario Argento films including Deep Red and Suspiria.

The Quietus called the record doom-laden and apocalyptic, built on a low male choir, church organ and a crunching opening riff on the track "Primeval." The outlet compared its atmosphere to Carpenter's scores for Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, and said the graphic novel's story centers on a religious cult responsible for the carnage that runs through it.

Carpenter hasn't said whether Cathedral points toward a return to directing. SPIN noted he appears to have retired from filmmaking at 78, and framed the album and graphic novel as evidence he has settled into a second career in metal music instead.