John Carpenter Turned a Dream Into 14 Cathedral Tracks

In 2024, John Carpenter dreamed of an abandoned church in downtown Los Angeles. There were catacombs underneath it and an elevator with a particularly poor choice of destination. On waking, he had the seed of a film and an immediate production problem: he reckoned the movie would cost several hundred million dollars. Cathedral arrived on August 7 by another route, as a graphic novel accompanied by a 14-track album.

The project reverses Carpenter’s usual order of work. He would once direct and cut a film, then watch the finished images and write music that served the story and its characters. Cathedral began without filmed images. Instead, each track corresponds to a section of the book, while the liner notes provide cues for placing the music against the page. A score has found a picture, only the projector is the reader.

Carpenter kept the production close. His son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies made the record with him; his wife, publisher Sandy King, developed the graphic novel with writer Sean Sobczak. The label’s notes describe a useful division of labour: Davies’s guitar leads “Primeval,” “Elevator” and “Lord of the Underground,” while the Carpenters’ synths carry “Desolation in the Underworld” and “Death of the Mapmaker.” The nightmare has assigned seats.

This was more than an economical family arrangement. Carpenter told the Associated Press that the film business now feels corporate to him; the comic gave a large story a form that did not require a studio-scale budget. The smaller medium does not shrink the premise. It transfers some of the work to the listener, who must build the camera movement and the elevator shaft from drawings, riffs and pulse.

When the conversation turned to artificial intelligence, Davies wondered why people who enjoy making music would outsource the making. Carpenter’s objection was more elemental: music can move people across countries without translation, and he wants that movement to come from humans. Cathedral makes the point without a lecture. Three collaborators built 14 pieces around a bad dream. No machine had to take the lift.