John Carpenter’s metal breakthrough is what we needed
There are those who quickly exhaust their creative streak… and then there is John Carpenter. The announcement of Cathedrala project arriving in August 2026 (but a taste has already been released, Lord of the Underground), represents yet another transmutation of an author who refuses to be confined to the limits of celluloid. The work is a narrative hybrid: one graphic novels published by Storm King Comics and a music album released by Sacred Bones Records, conceived to exist in rigorous symbiosis; each song on the album corresponds to a chapter of the graphic novels.
So let’s talk about a total multimedia work: not a soundtrack added a posteriori to a pre-existing narrative work, nor a comic born as spin off of a musical product, but a system designed together in which visual text and sound text generate each other. There graphic novels was co-written by Sandy King and Sean Sobczak, illustrated by Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna, with colors by Ryan Winn and lettering by Marshall Dillon. The album was instead created by Carpenter together with his band long-time collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.
The story is based on an abandoned church in downtown Los Angeles, which from a forgotten building becomes the scene of a nightmare. The killing of a police officer brings attention to the long-ignored cathedral: Lieutenant Christine Marks and detectives Paul Hernandez and Steve Mayfield are drawn into an investigation that leads them into the building’s catacombs and towards an evil entity from centuries agoimprisoned underground. The creative spark was dreamlike in the most literal sense of the word: the entire album was directly inspired by the story of graphic novelswhich itself was born from a dream Carpenter had in 2024. “It was so cinematic and vivid. I thought: I have to write the score. It’s our first heavy metal album“.
Against the system, again
To understand the greatness of this transmedia breakthrough, we must remember who John Carpenter is more filmmaker what a director. As Federico Greco explains in his Cinema and powerthe traditional director is, in fact, an employee of capital: by chasing profit in commissioned projects, he ends up absorbing and reproducing the values, compromises and reassurances of the power structure that writes the cheques. On the contrary, the filmmaker – like, indeed, John Carpenter – moves with an opposite logic: he exploits the mechanisms of the market to find the money necessary to materialize his art, imposing conditions in which the dominant ideology cannot water down the final result.
This is why Carpenter’s absence from traditional film direction (his last feature film, The Warddates back to 2010) is not creative decline, but act of resistance. Rather than bowing to the algorithmic logic of Hollywood gods franchiseCarpenter changes the battlefield. Self-producing comics with Storm King Comics (led by his wife and producer Sandy King) and recording records with an independent label like Sacred Bones, proves that a filmmaker it doesn’t need a set to exercise its expressive power. If the system doesn’t allow him to make a film on his own terms, he makes it anyway, using ink, synthesizers and distorted guitars.
Because metal is perfect
The transition from electronic minimalism to pure heavy metal by Cathedral it is the most coherent of the evolutions, because the structural and thematic characteristics of metal overlap perfectly with Carpenter’s cinematic poetics. His cinema is based on perennial tension, on a sense of inescapable threat; from a musical point of view, this has historically translated intostubborn: methodical patterns repeated obsessively (the famous 5/4 time of Halloweenthe bass pulsations of District 13 – The Death Brigades). Heavy metal shares this identical architecture, being based on the riff. Replacing the cold sequences of a synth with the thrust of an electric guitar can even enhance the grammar of Carpenterian terrorgiving it a higher specific weight, perfect for summoning underground monsters. After all, it is no mystery that the author of They live be in love with Metallica from the nineties.
Both Carpenter’s soundtracks and metal (especially in the doom genres that pay homage to Black Sabbath) draw on minor scales, claustrophobic chromaticisms and the tritone, historically known as diabolus in music. This precise harmonic choice prevents the resolution of the chords, instilling a profound in the listener sense of unease and instability. On a conceptual level, metal has an established tradition of exploring the supernatural, the occult and the cosmic. From Scandinavian black metal to epic doom, metal has developed a very similar imagery to the Carpenterian one: ancient entities, closed and claustrophobic spaces, violence as a manifestation of metaphysical as well as social evil. Heavy metal is the cultural epicenter of marginality and disillusionment; is a genre that sings of impending apocalypses, cosmic horrors and social collapses — the exact same themes explored in Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” (The thing, The lord of evil, The seed of madness) — and that rejects the respectability and superficiality of mainstream poppreferring to look straight into the abyss.
For those who don’t know, John Carpenter can’t read music: “I play all the keyboards, but I can’t write a note,” he admitted several times. Technical ignorance is paradoxically a fundamental interpretative key: it means that his sound language is entirely empirical, built on timbral intuition and economy of means. Choosing heavy metal for CathedralCarpenter simply found the definitive language for its role as filmmaker rebel: a relentless, massive and incorruptible sound, built specifically for those who have no intention of lowering their gaze in the face of monsters, whether they are hidden underground in Los Angeles or in the executive offices of Hollywood.
