Sounds Scary: John Carpenter & Ennio Morricone
By Stephen Dalton
The Thing, dir. John Carpenter, 1982
Sounds Scary
John Carpenter reflects on enlisting Ennio Morricone to score The Thing
By Stephen Dalton
October 23, 2023
Long before he became an internationally feted movie director, John Carpenter was a musician. As the son of a music professor and classical violinist, the future cult-film icon grew up playing piano, guitar and bass, even briefly joining a band called Kaleidoscope. So when he moved into directing with Dark Star (1974) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), composing his own electronic scores made perfect sense. For an indie auteur shooting on a tight schedule and squeezed budget, hiring professional composers or full orchestras was simply impossible. Over time, Carpenter’s nerve-jangling soundtracks became intrinsic to his filmography, a unique sonic signature.
From left: John Carpenter in the studio; Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady in The Thing
Since 2015, on top of his official score albums, Carpenter has released five collections of lost, rare and reworked tracks, re-recorded with his son, Cody Carpenter, and godson, Daniel Davies. The latest, Anthology II (Movies Themes 1976–1988), has just been released. Speaking to Galerie from his L.A. home, the 75-year-old director recalls a rare occasion when he worked with another composer, on his deep-frozen body-horror sci-fi classic The Thing (1982). This magisterial fusion of blood-chilling paranoia and eye-popping visual effects was made for Universal on a relatively generous $15 million budget, which meant Carpenter could afford to hire major talent. Naturally, he went straight for the best: Italian maestro Ennio Morricone.
“That wasn’t imposed, it was my choice,” Carpenter recalls. “But they wouldn’t consider me as a composer. Nobody wanted me. So let’s go to the master! Let’s go to Morricone! And he was available, so that all worked out great. We flew over to Rome to meet him. He couldn’t speak any English, so I had a translator. He was unbelievable, a gentleman.”
Anthology II (Movie Themes 1976–1988) by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies
Without seeing any footage, Morricone recorded around 20 minutes of music for The Thing for Carpenter to deploy as he wanted. Brooding pieces like “Humanity,” “Despair” and “Sterilization” are slow crescendos of prowling dread and phantom menace, their minor-key woodwind, string and harp motifs occasionally flirting with the vintage gothic-horror melodrama of church organ. The score is unusually stark and restrained for Morricone, partly because Carpenter protested that he was using “too many notes” for the title theme, which the maestro duly simplified. The final version has a pulsing electronic heartbeat that feels like a fruitful hybrid of both composers: Carpenter remixing Morricone.
While cutting Morricone’s score into The Thing, Carpenter realized these understated mood pieces did not quite work in a few tension-heavy scenes. At this point the director “secretly ran off” and recorded three more short, minimalist tracks full of ambient dread and suspended synthesizer drones. They became “Burn It,” “Fuchs” and “To Mac’s Shack”—minor adornments, Carpenter explains, more like cues than fully actualized pieces. “Really simple,” he says. “Some of it’s just top tones. I just thought it needed a little bit more there.”
Ennio Morricone
“The final version has a pulsing electronic heartbeat that feels like a fruitful hybrid of both composers: Carpenter remixing Morricone.”
Musically, Carpenter insists, The Thing still belongs to Morricone. “In no way was I trying to compete with Ennio’s score,” he says. Indeed, he never mentioned his additions to the late soundtrack maestro. “No, he didn’t know,” Carpenter confirms. “The deal was he recorded several pieces of music in Italy for us and a couple over here, and that was all he did for the movie. But then we needed something for this area here, so I just did it myself. It was quicker and more efficient. It wasn’t because I was any better, I’ll tell you that.”
Alas, not even Morricone could save The Thing from box-office disaster. Released two weeks after Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, it was a critical and commercial flop. Like most cult movies, the film only accumulated its word-of-mouth reputation over the long haul; it is now widely regarded as Carpenter’s career-topping masterpiece. Four decades later, the director remains baffled by his film’s initially hostile reception.
“Just a guess, but it was too dark for audiences at the time,” Carpenter muses. “Too ferocious. It was too much about the end of the world. People wanted to feel up, so they chose E.T. instead. That made them feel good. The Thing was not a friendly movie. It was too adult for them. It was a movie that ripped your guts out.”
The Thing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Ennio Morricone