John Carpenter is heading back into horror, although not in the way most fans probably expected or wanted, but that doesn’t stop the Master of Horror’s next project from sounding like the closest thing to a classic Carpenter nightmare we’ve gotten in years. Few filmmakers understand atmosphere the way Carpenter does. Even decades after Halloween, The Thing, and Prince of Darkness, his work still feels uniquely capable of turning simple locations into spaces audiences instinctively fear.
That same style of dread appears to be driving his latest project, which taps directly into the moody, synth-heavy nightmare storytelling that has defined his career for decades, while also reuniting him with collaborators who helped shape some of his strongest modern scores.
The legendary filmmaker has announced Cathedral, a new audio-and-visual narrative project that combines an original graphic novel with a companion album designed to function as the score for an unseen movie. Releasing through Storm King Comics on August 4, the graphic novel marks Carpenter’s first original comic project and follows an investigation surrounding an abandoned church hiding something ancient beneath downtown Los Angeles. According to the official synopsis, the story begins after the killing of a police officer draws attention to the long-forgotten cathedral. Lieutenant Christine Marks and detectives Paul Hernandez and Steve Mayfield eventually descend into the church’s catacombs, where they uncover a centuries-old evil waiting beneath the city.
The project’s companion album releases August 7 through Sacred Bones Records and was created alongside longtime collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. The trio previously worked together on the Lost Themes albums and the recent Halloween trilogy scores, making this reunion feel especially fitting for another synth-soaked descent into horror. The first single, “Lord of the Underground,” debuted May 19 alongside a visualizer featuring artwork pulled from the graphic novel.
‘Cathedral’ Sounds Like Pure Carpenter Nightmare Fuel
What makes Cathedral immediately interesting is how heavily it leans into the exact kind of horror Carpenter has always excelled at. The setup feels spiritually connected to movies like Prince of Darkness, where ancient evil, religion, urban decay, and cosmic terror all collide together into something deeply unsettling. Even the idea of an abandoned Los Angeles cathedral hiding something beneath its foundations is akin to the kind of paranoid supernatural horror Carpenter perfected in the 1980s. The importance of the music component cannot be understated as well, because a defining aspect of Carpenter‘s films has always been their scores.
Structuring Cathedral around both a graphic novel and a full companion album makes the entire project sound like audiences are being handed the pieces of a movie that exists somewhere inside Carpenter’s head. Plus, the idea of Carpenter turning an underground cathedral beneath Los Angeles into a synth-drenched nightmare might be the most John Carpenter concept imaginable, and it’s going to be great to see what nightmare (literally, this was all inspired by a “vividly cinematic dream” he had in 2024) he’s cooked up this time.
via Collider