Michael Myers would be any other masked psycho without the killer piano-and-synth theme that has accompanied all of his mass murdering since his first appearance in the original. Back in 1978, director John Carpenter composed the score himself, not out of a need for total creative control, but as a cost-cutting tactic for what was a very low-budget slasher flick.
CARPENTER: We try different sounds and different approaches, but the basics stay the same. It’s still the same old theme; as a matter of fact, we took all the themes from the original film and refurbished them and brought them up to date and rethought some of them. And it seems to work pretty well. That’s not an answer.
GREEN: You kind of just touched on that, but can you talk about how the advances in technology have changed the way that you work?, I had three days, a piano, and a tube synthesizer program by the synth teacher at USC.And he had to tune these babies up before you could play him. Some of the stuff that I was playing was like a semitone off. It was horrible, but we got through it.
GREEN: That’s great. But you did some of the scores for your films, and other times, you didn’t. How did you decide? Was there an inspiration, or just whether you were appropriate for the content or not?, they didn’t even want me. This was early on in my career, so I hadn’t really proven myself. We got Ennio Morricone, who was one of the giants of scoring, so I had no problem with that whatsoever.