John Carpenter

As the years passed, sci-fi/horror director John Carpenter earned nearly as much acclaim for his music as for his filmmaking. The son of a music professor at Western Kentucky University, he crafted a distinctive sound dominated by pulsing, arpeggiated synthesizers and atmospheric washes that echoed his stark visual style. From his beginnings as a film student in the early '70s, Carpenter scored all but four of his films (The Thing, Starman, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and The Ward) as well as the television horror trilogy Body Bags. During the 2000s and 2010s, artists such as...