John Carpenter’s “Night” Video: Watch The Perfectly Creepy Odyssey
If you’re not yet hip to John Carpenter’s synthy, spooky 2015 album Lost Themes, do yourself a favor and check it out. The famed horror director knows a thing or two about knocking out some creepy chords — after all, he scored his own films like Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog and Escape From New York — and Carpenter’s instrumental album shows that he hasn’t lost his signature sound all these years later.
Video games proved to be a big inspiration for the director while making Lost Themes, something that’s apparent in the new music video for “Night.” Here we see the director enter a virtual reality world where he takes on an alternative life as a dark, helmeted night driver who speeds through the empty Los Angeles freeway system. Armed with a baseball bat, he eventually parks, only to encounter a similarly-dressed figure wielding a sword in a dimly-lit parking garage.
“We’d play a video game for a couple hours, then we’d go downstairs to my Logic Pro setup and we’d improvise music for a couple hours,” Carpenter explained to Idolator recently, while detailing how he and son Cody began working on the music that would eventually make up Lost Themes. “And we went through a lot of different feels for the music. I finally ended doing almost a soundtrack sampler of dramatic music. We just kept doing it and doing it and doing it. Finally I had about 60 minutes worth of music done, all improvised.”
The “Night” video was directed by Gavin Hignight and Ben Verhuist. Hignight had the following to say about the visual in a press release:
Upon hearing ‘Night’ by John Carpenter my head was instantly filled with these nighttime highway road dreamscapes. Someone or something, haunted, traveling the road alone in the late hours. Our goal was to take that feeling and put it into a video that paid tribute to the film work of Carpenter but at the same time gave him a new world to play in… in this case, literally through Virtual Reality.
Watch John Carpenter’s “Night” video above.
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