Zombie Zombie Pledge Allegiance to the Church of Carpenter

Zombie Zombie’s admiration for the great horror soundtracks of the last century is no big secret, so how was it to try on John Carpenter’s tunes at Glasgow Film Festival earlier in the year?
It was our first time trying; I’m not sure we played them the best but we enjoyed ourselves. Glasgow Film Festival actually made the offer for us to do that, and we thought it’d be a pity to leave it at that one show and not record the tunes. So we recorded five John Carpenter covers and did this whole EP. We wouldn’t have dared do it ourselves; it was just nice that someone else gave us the excuse.

You and Etienne [Jaumet] come from very different backgrounds [playing drums in Herman Dune and working as a solo jazz/electronic musician respectively], how did you wind up making danceable reinterpretations of horror soundtracks?
It came from the instruments we’re used to. Etienne’s keyboard has been used a lot in 70s movies – Carpenter used a lot of the same effects and drum machines, the same with Goblin on George A. Romero’s films. As teenagers we were big fans of Carpenter’s movies before knowing his music. He’s like Hitchcock in the way he executes some of his plots, and has a similar sense of adventure. It’s in the way they’re written – the plot, and of course if you’re into special effects they’re amazingly done. To me he really matters in movie history, I think he’s a pioneer of minimal music in general too. The idea was to show people that this guy wrote the best tunes and we should play them to people to make them move.

The stop-animation tribute to The Thing [Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free] was a beauty, maybe there’s a future in scoring animated horror starring plastic action figures…
Some friends of ours made that video at home in Paris over four months; it takes a lot of time. I was really happy, it’s very well done. Because we used GI Joes – the toy by Hasbro – we weren’t allowed to broadcast it. This was right before they released a GI Joe movie and to them it was too violent. That’s too bad for my friends who made it, because it would have been better to broadcast it on more than YouTube. We’ll have to do one without Hasbro toys next time. They’re a big company; we asked gently and they replied not very gently. We’d love to record a movie score though, any time; not only just a horror, but a comedy – anything!