John Howard Carpenter, born on January 16, 1948, in Carthage, New York, built
parallel careers as a filmmaker and composer. Raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky,
where his father headed Western Kentucky University’s music department, he
studied filmmaking at USC and began combining images with his own electronic
scores on Dark Star in the early 1970s. After directing and scoring Assault on
Precinct 13, John Carpenter achieved his breakthrough with Halloween in 1978.
Its stark, repeating piano theme became his signature composition and
established the minimalist synthesizer approach ...