Album Of The Week: John Carpenter Lost Themes

There are plenty of reasons the horror and sci-fi and action movies of the late-'70s and '80s have aged so well. There was the self-conscious and shameless cheapness of it all: These were movies designed to entertain fucked-up teenagers, and they prized jolts and cheap thrills and general viciousness. But there was also the '60s-hangover sense that you could cram big ideas into these cheap shells: The future warriors sent back through time to change or preserve the course of history, the vision of New York as a byzantine map of colorful gang territories, the escaped mental patient who turned out to be the true embodiment of unstoppable evil. There were the special effects: Sophisticated and tactile and often genuinely disgusting before CGI came in and gave filmmakers a way-too-realisitic shortcut. And then there was the music. Somewhere in there, directors and composers figured out that synthesizers could create an otherworldly sensibility that orchestral scores couldn't. Louis and Bebe Barron made the first-ever all-electronic score for the 1956 sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet and came away with something unsettling even in a movie with a wooden and straightlaced Leslie Nielsen as the star. By the time Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange in 1971, Wendy Carlos had elevated that feeling to high art. And by the late-'70s, there was a whole generation of musicians whose gleaming synthscapes had changed the way movies sounded, turning them into tense dreamlike reveries: Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder, Goblin, Brad Fiedel, Harry Manfredini, Charles Bernstein. And then there was John Carpenter, possibly the greatest of all of them.