John Carpenter's Cathedral

Greetings! From time to time, I like to write special articles when something interesting and unique comes along. Such is the case this week with John Carpenter, one of my favourite directors and musicians of all-time, who saw his debut full-length graphic novel be published on Tuesday, August 4^th as well as its accompanying album released yesterday on Friday, August 7^th. I’m talking about John Carpenter’s Cathedral.

The 128-page graphic novel is published via Storm King Comics, founded by his wife Sandy King, who also co-wrote the book with John and Sean Sobczak. The gorgeous art is courtesy of Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna. Cathedral unfolds like a nightmarish lucid dream from the Master of Horror. Inspired by a dream John had in 2024, it tells the story of Lieutenant Christine Marks who investigates her father’s gruesome and mysterious death within an abandoned church. With the help of detectives Paul Hernandez and Steve Mayfield, they’ll make their way deep down into the bowels of the cathedral and encounter a plethora of perils leading to a demon named Tezcatlipoca who reigns over the underworld, more than 1,000 feet below the church. As a long-time comic book fan/collector, this graphic novel really hit the spot for me. It’s fast-paced, has a resilient protagonist, features stunning art throughout and as horror comics go, it delivers the goods in spades with creative obstacles and doesn’t give us a happy ending. John said in an interview that back in the days when he was directing, this would’ve been a storyboard to a movie and it feels like it could easily have been turned into a terrific horror film, especially with the accompanying soundtrack.

Cathedral, the album, is the fifth original LP of non-movie music John has done with his son Cody Carpenter on synths and godson Daniel Davies on guitars. It’s released through Sacred Bones Records, the same label that put out Carpenter’s Lost Themes Vol. 1 through 4 as well as the new Halloween trilogy scores. I’ve been a huge fan of Carpenter’s music from the get-go; his score to Halloween (1978) is a soundtrack that I play every year around the spooky season—Halloween is actually my favourite movie of all time—and it never gets old. His scores for Escape from New York, The Fog, and Halloween III (which he did with Alan Howarth) are some of my most cherished soundtracks. I’ve greatly enjoyed his Lost Themes series over the last decade and was eager to hear the soundtrack to the Cathedral graphic novel. It was recorded before the book was fully written/illustrated but it serves as a perfect score to it. It’s highly atmospheric, it’s got more of a metal edge than the Lost Themes albums, gets much darker at times (and rightfully so as the Cathedral story is quite gloomy) while still maintaining that vintage John Carpenter synth sound we all love so much. The three singles released thus far (“Lord of the Underground”, “The Ferryman”, and “Revenge”) are great snapshots of what the full score has to offer. Even if you’re not into comic books/graphic novels, the album still stands on its own as a superb record of instrumental electronic and metal music.

John Carpenter’s Cathedral is the audio-visual event of the summer. This is the closest we’ll get to seeing a new John Carpenter film and the combination of a lengthy comic book along with an album of music to play while you read goes hand in hand. Cathedral is an immersive, fully-realized project of sound and vision depicting an eerie and otherworldly foray into a location grounded in reality. I’m eager to see and hear what John does next in both these mediums; this is the best of both worlds for me and I have a feeling his fans and horror aficionados in general will have a blast with the book and the album.

Official Website for John Carpenter’s Cathedral

John Carpenter’s Cathedral on Bandcamp