Live Music Review: John Carpenter

John Carpenter performed on October 23 at Colston Hall, Bristol, concluding the Simple Things Festival 2016

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ith Netflix’s Stranger Things resurrecting spooky synth music for new audiences, now seems like the perfect time for ‘The Horror Master’ himself, John Carpenter, to bring his haunting scores to the stage for his first ever tour. The 68-year-old director-actor-producer-editor-writer-composer — whose filmography includes genre-defining chillers like Halloween and The Thing — took to the stage one cold October night at Bristol’s Colston Hall.

Carpenter has gathered an undying cult following during his career, and this owes as much to his use of stomach-churning visuals as it does to his eldritch backing music. This reverence is evidenced as he walks on stage, the horror fans welcoming him with beholden applause. The drums beat, and euphoria erupts through the crowd as they recognise the pulsating opening bars of Escape from New York’s main theme. We are instantly transported to the dystopian future of 1997, as the New York skyline — rendered in retro graphics — materialises on the screen behind the stage.

Carpenter’s synthesiser leads a six-piece band, including his son, Cody, on second keyboards. Three guitarists and a drummer provide a heavier, prog-rock edge not present in Carpenter’s original scores — the electronic compositions ominously unfolding like Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. As we creep into Vortex — the opening track from his first non-movie album, Lost Themes (2015) — the delightful, 80’s disco vibes are retained and intensified by the neon pink-blue flicker of the stage lighting. While the moustached, long-haired Carpenter bops along to the music, it’s hard not to view him as some kind of messiah. His eccentricity makes him seem like a character straight out of one of his own movies.

“For most of my career I composed music for scary movies, thrillers …ghost stories” Carpenter tells us, the stage filling with dry ice for The Fog’s score. It’s clear that intense cinematic nostalgia grips the audience, and indeed, in the periods where Carpenter performs material from his studio albums, the accompanying projected film clips are markedly absent. It should be noted, however, that this show is not just an exercise in sentimentality. Carpenter looks forward by performing impressive material from his recent studio albums, including the guitar shrieking tracks Wraith and Distant Dream, compositions which — while bearing Carpenter’s signature uncanny atmosphere — have an unmistakable rock ‘n’ roll energy.

As the band puts on sunglasses to perform music from the irreverently anti-capitalist They Live, it’s easy to see why Carpenter’s films have such enduring appeal. Slogans from the 1988 film fill the stage — “OBEY”, “MONEY IS YOUR GOD”, “BUY”, “CONSUME” — and this performance makes the film’s message seem urgently pertinent.

“In 1982 I made a movie called The Thing”, Carpenter announces to thunderous applause. The Thing’s score was the result of a collaboration between Carpenter and legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone. Performed in Morricone’s honour, the theme is comparatively minimalist in its gradually escalating dread, but footage from the film provides a gruesome animatronic backdrop that sustains the audience’s excitement.

"I direct horror movies. I love horror movies. Horror movies will live forever” says Carpenter, before we hear the striking piano melody we’ve all been waiting for — the theme from Halloween.

John Carpenter has forged a musical aesthetic that has become synonymous with horror. While his music is defined by bleakness and discord, witnessing it performed live is intoxicating and thrilling. Carpenter has proven tonight that he is not only the master of the horror genre, but a legitimate musician in his own right.

Film Review: The Witch (2016)

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he Witch (suitably stylised as The VVitch), the feature-length debut and Sundance triumph from Robert Eggers, manages to derive its terror not only from witchcraft, but from the unknown, claustrophobia, the fear of God and the bleak landscape. The 17^th century. New England. a family is excommunicated from a Puritan Christian plantation for “prideful conceit.” The exiled family must survive on their own farm, out in the wilds near a forest.

The family, father William (Ralph Ineson), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), their daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) their son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) and their young twin children Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) provide the sparse main cast. Months after their exile, Katherine gives birth to her fifth child, Samuel. When the unbaptised baby vanishes, apparently abducted by a witch, Katherine is distraught, spending her days praying to God and weeping.

As the plot slowly unravels like a camp fire tale, it draws us in with its folkloric disquiet.  The whole cast delivers pragmatically naturalist performances. Eggers’ script clearly had authenticity in mind, the dialogue is an historically accurate representation of Puritan dialect. In fact, Eggers’ script lifts some dialogue directly from Puritan prayer manuals. The film draws on concepts so archetypal, they would verge on being outmoded had they been handled with less care. We fear God with these characters, their desperation as they beg for mercy instils an anxiety within us – we want their prayers to be answered.

The dialogue’s archaic validity is matched by the film’s eerily plausible visuals. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke chose to shoot The Witch in a 1.66 aspect ratio, giving a timeless, claustrophobic feel to cinema audiences who presume the use of widescreen. The woods seem taller, and the huts more enclosed. Predominantly natural lighting was used for exterior shots, and interiors are often shot by candlelight, giving the film the genuine visual aesthetic of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). The colour palette is bleak and subdued, adding to the palpable hopelessness.

The film continuously plays with genre convention, while other horror texts would rely on jump-scares and gory imagery, The Witch derives its trepidation from escalating dread, constructing an experience that is as tight as a drum. In one particularly well-crafted sequence, inordinate tension is drawn from wood chopping, using a combination of excellent editing and sound design. The film-makers even manage to find fear from an unlikely source – a hare. While not without its shocking moments, the film primarily unnerves us through suggestion, and what lies beyond its narrow frame.

Cinema audiences will of course associate witches with the low-budget, found footage style of The Blair Witch Project (1999). But The Witch stands apart by tracing its subject matter back to its roots, capturing colonial America’s first witch hysteria, in a setting 62 years before the notorious Salem Witch Trials. In deriving fear from the archetypal and loosely building on a foundation of historical records, Eggers manages through sheer verisimilitude to deliver what is a novel experience.

Building gradually towards its comparatively explicit – albeit somewhat ambiguous – crescendo, this is a film which gets under the skin, but the real horror only sets in once we have left the cinema. The film’s authenticity leaves us feeling unsettled, as if we have flipped through a dusty occult manuscript we were not meant to see. The Witch is an extraordinary achievement for the horror genre, and a promising first offering from newcomer writer-director Robert Eggers.