It’s been 16 years since the last John Carpenter-directed film, and 25 years since the wildly influential multihyphenate crafted a soundtrack to accompany one of his own visual projects. That changes this week with Cathedral, which arrived Tuesday (Aug. 4) as a graphic novel and Friday (Aug. 7) as a soundtrack album.

Inspired by a weirdly detailed nightmare Carpenter had a few years ago, John Carpenter’s Cathedral follows three police investigators as they descend into a demonic underworld, seeking answers for the grisly murder of a cop in an abandoned church.

To accompany his debut graphic novel (the first new visual project from the legendary director since his 2010 film The Ward), Carpenter hit the studio with his longtime musical collaborators Cody Carpenter (his son) and Daniel Davies (his godson). Where the trio’s previous work (four installments of the acclaimed Lost Themes series as well as soundtracks for four films by other directors) was often eerie and minimalist, the Cathedral album goes hard, finding Carpenter, Carpenter and Davies churning out hammer-of-the-gods heavy metal riffs to accompany the hellishly vivid imagery of the book.

Created in collaboration with Sandy King (his wife, longtime creative partner and the founder of publisher Storm King Comics) and writer Sean Sobczak — with illustrations by Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna, coloring by Sian Mandrake and lettering by Marshall Dillon — the graphic novel stands on its own as a harrowing narrative. But thanks to the Cathedral album (out on Sacred Bones Records), the project becomes an engrossing audio-visual experience – and provides fans of the horror icon with the closest thing to a new John Carpenter movie we’ve had in years.

Billboard spoke with John Carpenter and Daniel Davies (the latter of whom fittingly stood in front of a Gothic cathedral in Brussels during the Zoom call) to learn about the project’s oneiric origins, whether Carpenter considers himself a metalhead and what life is like for the legend these days.

John, I gather this concept came to you in a dream. Are your dreams always so terrifying?

John Carpenter: No, they’re not. This is just a narrative dream, which I don’t really have much. I usually have frustration dreams — I’m trying to direct, and no one will listen to me, and time is running out. I’m lost somewhere. But this dream was really elaborate, and it was a story borrowed heavily from Greek mythology, but a story nonetheless. I was amazed at it when I woke up, and I told Daniel and Cody and we decided to do an album.

What did you think of the dream when you first heard about it, Daniel?

Davies: Like John said, it was so vivid, and it just seemed like, “We have to do music for this.” As it evolved, when John told us the story, those images evoked a certain feeling and made us think of a certain sound. We just went with that, and it evolved from there.

So at what point did the graphic novel element come in?

Davies: That came later. John had this outline of the story, and that’s where we started the songwriting, based on that outline.

Carpenter: It started as an idea in my mind to do a graphic novel because my wife is the editor and publisher of a comic company [Storm King Comics]. So I thought, well, maybe we can do that. It came after the album was done — it was last year, basically, when they started writing. My wife Sandy [King] and Sean [Sobczak] fleshed out a lot of the characterizations and a lot of the situations — more than I had, because I basically had just an outline. The graphic novel is in more depth.

The album is a bit harder, rock-wise, than some of the stuff you’ve done before. Did it start out with that heavy metal vibe?

Davies: As John was describing these sequences in the story, it just seemed like it would lend itself to heavy guitars and big drums and choirs. Everything we do is based on feel, and it just felt right. We each bring in different sketches for different scenes and then work on them all together. It was all based on the story. The story led us down this path of a more heavy rock album.

Do you just improvise, and then afterward figure out, “OK, we have a song here”?

Davies: Yeah, kind of. Like on “Lord of the Underground,” John would say, “Hey, we need a heavy riff for this main sequence in the story, where there’s a battle with the main character and this demonlike figure.” Then he’d sketch out a little riff, and we’d build it from there.

The metal connection makes sense too, because it’s a cathedral, and there’s so much Catholic imagery that seems metal in a way. Statues of flayed saints, that kind of thing.

Carpenter: I guess it does.

In terms of music tastes, are either of you big metalheads, or is it just part of the palette of music that you listen to?

Carpenter: It’s part of the rich pageantry of humanity that passes by, and some of it is metal. I love Metallica. [The Black Album] is probably a high for me. I’m not overly crazed on metal. I don’t know about you, Daniel — would you describe yourself as a metalhead?

Davies: No, but like you’re saying, it’s just one of many types of music that I love. I don’t think about music in terms of categories — does it move me, and I go with it. We love Goblin, Metallica, Diamond Head, Ennio Morricone. It doesn’t matter. It’s just how you put the music together that gives it that heavy feel.

What was the graphic novel creation process like? How much of the storyboarding are you controlling as you go through this, if any of it?

Carpenter: I wrote an outline, and the outline guided Sandy and Sean. They would sit over one side of the room and go through the outline and flesh it out — work on the characterization, the action — and I would sit across from them playing video games and listening and pipe up when something I thought was important, but mainly they did it themselves. So that’s how it worked. It was all from the outline.

That’s a nice way to work. What video game were you playing?

Carpenter: Fallout 76.

You really can’t beat that. So you sit around playing video games and then pipe in where they were getting it right or wrong. How much artistic license did the illustrators get?

Carpenter: Total. I’d let them do their job. They weren’t around to tell me what chords to play; I’m not going to tell them how to draw. They were really talented artists. Let them go.

In the intro to the graphic novel, John, you say that in a different time you might have written a screenplay and made a movie, but times have changed. To your mind, what has changed that would prevent this from being a movie?

Carpenter: The film industry has definitely changed. [Spoiler alert ahead.] I could be wrong, but I’m not certain a studio would put up, say, $100 million for a movie in which the heroine blinds herself in the end. I just don’t think that’s gonna fly. Horror movies are seen as inexpensive, all throughout time. Rarely has one been a big, giant deal. The Silence of the Lambs was an A production, but mainly horror is thought of as B productions. I don’t think they would step up to the plate.

It would certainly be costly — creating an underworld, the special effects.

Carpenter: We’d have to build a whole bunch of that. But that’s my thought. And I don’t want to work that hard anymore.

That’s pretty reasonable. If you can sit around playing video games and make a graphic novel, why the hell would you want to get up at the crack of dawn to direct a movie?

Carpenter: Never truer words have been spoken.

I wanted to ask about live performances. Any chance you’re going to bring this to the stage — perform Cathedral live and maybe have elements of the graphic novel incorporated somehow?

Carpenter: Maybe. We’re not there yet. We’ll see how it goes. We did play last year around Halloween — we were playing live at the Belasco Theater, was it?

Davies: Yeah, the Belasco, down in downtown Los Angeles. We played “Lord of the Underground.”

Carpenter: We had played it, yeah. And there’s a live version of “Lord of the Underground” on the record.

With something like this, how much do you pay attention to the response? Do you read reviews, go online and see what people have to say about it?

Carpenter: Nah. I’m pretty happy with it myself. That’s not necessary.

Davies: It seems like the general vibe is that people are excited and happy about it. But I don’t get too in depth into reviews.

John, you’ve obviously been doing music longer than Cody or Daniel — but have they surpassed you at this point?

Carpenter: Way surpassed me. Well, it’s different. Daniel is a maestro on guitar, and Cody is a maestro on the keyboards. I can’t play anywhere near what they play. I have medium chops, and that’s that. It’s always been that way, so I don’t try to get out of my ability — I can’t do it. But I have the ability of coming up with rhymes and songs and tunes. Daniel and Cody are maestros. We all mesh really well together.

Davies: We all bring out the best in each other, and that’s what you hear when you listen to the music.

What was your first reaction when you got the final draft of this graphic novel and read it for the first time?

Carpenter: I just had it in my hands two or three nights ago for the first time, and it’s unbelievable. I’m just looking at the art, and these artists are real — they’re good, man. So I’m very excited by it. It’s wonderful.

Davies: As the images were coming in, we were floored by how good they were. Everything just seemed to work without difficulty. It all flowed. This project really flowed and felt really inspired.

Are you working on new material now? How frequently are the three of you hitting the studio?

Carpenter: We might be working on something new, and we might be working very hard on something new.

Davies: Yeah, we’re always writing music. We’re always working.

Earlier this year you did a Grammy Museum event with Claudio Simonetti. Would you ever invite someone like Claudio into the studio to contribute?

Carpenter: Absolutely. We’d love to play live with Claudio. That’d be so much fun.

I would pay good money to see that.

Carpenter: There you go. Well, you can send that money right now if you want.

I’ll get your Venmo. Obviously, one of the big technological innovations now affecting music, comics and film is AI. What are your thoughts about using AI for art, for cutting corners or whatever?

Carpenter: I’m not sure what I’d use. Do you have an idea about this, Daniel?

Davies: We enjoy making it, so right now I don’t see a use for that. If it could help be an assistant engineer — that would be nice. Predict when I want a new track and things like that. But as far as creating it, if AI makes it, then we didn’t make it. The joy of doing it is the making of it, for me — I think for all of us. So I don’t have a use for it in that way.

You do it because you love to do it, not just to get it done.

Carpenter: That’s correct.

John, have you had any other graphic-novel-worthy dreams since then?

Carpenter: I’m not going to tell you that.

Courtesy Sacred Bones Records