John Carpenter got the rhythm for the “Halloween” theme from a Christmas present. When he was 13, his father bought him a pair of bongos and used them to teach him 5/4 time. Years later, with a slasher film budgeted at roughly $300,000 and no money for a composer, Carpenter sat down at a piano and played that rhythm in octaves. Forty-eight years on, the riff is still the sound of Michael Myers, and it does more to define him than anything he does on screen.
Carpenter Records The Halloween Theme
Carpenter had already scored his first two features. Before he started on this one, he screened the finished cut, without music or sound effects, for a young 20th Century Fox executive, and she wasn’t scared. He later wrote on his website, in a passage Berklee Online reprints, that he became determined to “save it with the music.”
He went into Sound Arts, a studio in Los Angeles, with three days to record the score, as he told KUSC’s Tim Greiving in 2018, and came out with five or six themes. Dan Wyman worked the synthesizers. “I’d tell Dan, ‘Give me something that sounds like strings,'” Carpenter told Rolling Stone, and Wyman would tune them until they got close. By Carpenter’s estimate, the main theme took about an hour.
The end credits list the music as performed by the Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra, which doesn’t exist. Bowling Green, Kentucky, is where Carpenter grew up and where his father taught music at Western Kentucky University. Forty years later, Carpenter rebuilt the theme for David Gordon Green’s 2018 sequel with his son Cody and his godson Daniel Davies, and the trio stayed on for Green’s two follow-ups.
Michael Myers in 5/4
To me, and plenty of other fans out there, the theme and Michael Myers were one and the same, much like the inseparable pairing of the shark in “Jaws” and the accompanying music.
The credits call Myers The Shape, and Carpenter built the character to be close to nothing. Nick Castle, the film school friend who wore the mask for most of the shoot, got the part partly because Carpenter liked how he moved. Carpenter told Rotten Tomatoes that his direction amounted to telling Castle where to walk, and he described Michael as “neither human, nor supernatural, but a combination.” That’s a lot to ask of a man in a painted mask crossing a street, and the music ends up doing most of the work.
The riff has Michael’s habits. It repeats without developing, and when the music does change, the whole figure moves to a new pitch and starts over intact, the way Michael keeps turning up at the back of Carpenter’s long shots without ever seeming to travel there. Underneath, the left hand barely moves. Most of its notes in the official arrangement are held for the full five beats, so the busy line on top runs over something close to motionless, which is also a fair picture of Michael standing at the edge of the frame, watching.
Even the meter keeps the listener off balance. Berklee Online’s Michele Darling notes that the accents fall in groups of 3, 3, 2 and 2, so each bar tips forward just as the ear starts to trust it.
Because Carpenter recorded the cues without the film in front of him and cut them in afterward, a process he called “scoring blind” when he spoke with Greiving, the theme’s tempo owes nothing to what happens on screen. It keeps the same pace whether a babysitter is laughing on the phone or running for her life. Castle’s Michael mostly walks, no matter what his victims do.
Carpenter rationed the theme, too, telling Greiving that after opening the film with it over a jack-o’-lantern, he brought it back only when he wanted to reset the story, and once more at the end. Mental Floss counts six appearances in all, plus variations. The last comes after Dr. Loomis shoots Michael off a second-floor balcony and looks down to find him gone.
What the official arrangement shows
The official piano arrangement on MuseScore is marked “Misterioso,” and the right hand plays the opening bars alone at mp. Each bar holds ten eighth notes, beamed six and four, with the top note on the first, fourth, seventh and ninth. That placement is where Darling’s 3-3-2-2 grouping comes from.
The main riff gets by on very few pitches, with F# repeating in the lower voice while the upper voice keeps returning to the C# a perfect fifth above. On the ninth eighth note, the C# rises a half step to D, the minor sixth above F#, and most of the tension in the piece sits on that one semitone. After the bass enters, the whole figure slides down a half step to C and F with a D-flat on top, then later climbs back. In a passage marked “Play 4 times,” the same shape moves onto B, with F# now in the upper voice and G doing the job D did, while the left hand climbs in octaves from B through D and E to F#.
The arrangement never reaches a final cadence, and its last instruction is “Repeat and Fade,” over bars where the left hand rests, and the right hand plays the riff alone, as it did at the start. Work on the right hand by itself first. Count the eighth notes 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2 against a metronome until the D drops in without thought, then add the left hand and let each bass note ring for its full value.
