You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

In 1978, John Carpenter wrote, directed, and scored the film Halloween. It was made on a $300,000 budget and ended up grossing over $70 million, making it one of the most successful independent movies ever released.

The main theme to the film became one of the most iconic pieces of cinematic music ever made. Halloween went on to become a franchise, with 10 more Halloween films since the original.

In October 2018, a new Halloween film was released, directed by David Gordon Green, and for the first time since the first film, John Carpenter composed a score that included remaking his theme song for the new film, this time with the help of his son Cody Carpenter and his godson Daniel Davies.

In this episode, the three of them break down how they did it. First, a little history. Here's John Carpenter.

When we made Halloween back in 1978, we didn't have any money for a composer, so I always knew that I was going to be the composer. We had three days at a recording studio, sound art studio, and central LA.

I knew I was going to do the main theme to Halloween, and I had that down pretty much. Everything else I was going to fake it, just improvise it.

So I had three days to do the score. Originally I wrote with a piano. That was the easiest and simplest.

But I didn't know how to use the synthesizers at the studio, and so Dan Wyman, the synthesizer teacher at USC, he tuned everything up.

So I would say to him, I want a rhythmic sound here, or I want something that sounded like violins.

I didn't have to confront what would happen if we had a lot of money to hire a composer, because we did. So I'll never know what I would have done. But everything worked pretty well. And I think I got all the melodies that I wanted.

After the first movie, I never believed there was much of a story left to tell. But the original people who held the rights decided, no, that's not a good idea. Let's keep making sequels. So I emotionally divorced myself from them long ago.

And so John Carpenter wasn't involved with the sequels, but then cut to 2016.

Well, I heard about another sequel to Halloween, and all of a sudden Jason Blum appears that Jason is a high-powered, rather successful horror producer in Hollywood. And he said to me, well, they're going to make a sequel.

So why don't you and I work on it, and we can make it good, we'll make it better. And I said, well, no one's really challenging me that way. So this is great. I'll do it.

The first step in making the new Halloween was to find a director. Jason Blum started seeing who was out there, who was interested. And finally came up with David Gordon Green.

He and his partner, Danny McBride, had come up with a story. So they came over here to pitch me the story. And see if I liked it, I thought it was terrific. And they said, well, will you do the music? And I said, yeah, I'll do it with my son and God's son.

The three of us have been putting out albums, and we'll do it together. So that's how it all came about.

I'm Cody Carpenter. Conceptually, we wanted to not stray too far from how my dad did an original film. So we use a lot of similar sounds and instruments from the first score, but kind of updated and modernized.

The piano was the first sound that we used, because that's kind of the main focus of the piece.

I'm Daniel Davies. Something that John pointed out early on is that the purity of that piano is what makes it scary. And it was important to keep that.

The piano from the new movie is clearer and brighter than the old sound. You need to have that piano.

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