WARNING: The following contains mild spoilers for Studio 666, currently playing in theaters.
Studio 666 is nothing if not a love letter to horror movies, with winks and in-jokes aplenty for hard-core horror fans to spot. Any project involving a rock band playing themselves is bound to include a lot of references to other chillers. That includes such touches as a book that closely resembles the Necronomicon from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead pictures and a case of writer’s block from Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl that smacks of Jack Torrance’s dilemma in The Shining.
But the best and most heartfelt comes from a cameo by director John Carpenter, one of several in the movie that nonetheless feels special. The circumstances under which he found himself in the film are unique, but they’re also a reflection of Carpenter’s singular cinematic legacy. A horror movie about a rock band couldn’t have found a more perfect in-joke.
Carpenter is a rare director who also composes his own music, and indeed his scores are integral parts of all his films. His passion for music remains unabated, and in the years since his last directing project — 2010’s The Ward — he has released three studio albums and toured with his band. He’s continued to compose scores as well, with contributions to the 2018 Halloween remake and the upcoming reboot of Firestarter, in addition to the theme music from Studio 666.
It goes beyond the score too. Rock music enters into the soundscape of his movies in a big way more often than not. Halloween, for instance, features Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” playing on the doomed babysitters’ car radio, while Christine was the first film to use George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” in its soundtrack, along with a plethora of 1950s rock and roll hits. His TV biopic Elvis was an early critical favorite, and he even gave rock star Alice Cooper a memorable (though wordless) role as a vagrant ghoul in 1987’s Prince of Darkness.
His acting is a little different and owes more to horror movie tradition than anything. Alfred Hitchcock famously made cameo appearances in his own movies: a protean form of Easter egg that subsequent horror directors have emulated. Carpenter tends to limit his onscreen appearances to unspoken cameos, though he often plays helicopter pilots–– in Starman, Escape from New York and Memoirs of an Invisible Man among others — and is a licensed pilot himself. His biggest acting turn took place in the 1993 anthology Body Bags, in which he served as host to the proceedings akin to the Tales from the Crypt‘s Crypt Keeper.
Grohl spoke to Bloody Disgusting about Carpenter’s cameo in the new film, which occurred through a series of fortuitous circumstances. The pair shared a mutual friend in lighting designer Dan Hadley, who encouraged Grohl to reach out to Carpenter. When he did, he learned to his surprise that Foo Fighters had toured with a band featuring Carpenter’s son Cody 15 years earlier. They apparently made the experience such a pleasant one for the younger Carpenter that his father was happy to appear in Studio 666 — and compose the theme — as a way of saying thank you.
The music connection is especially notable considering that Foo Fighters are playing themselves. Studio 666 makes great sport of the idea that rock and roll is evil, something other horror movies have tried to embrace from time to time with mixed results at best. Bringing in a director with such a close connection to music is almost too enticing to pass up.
Studio 666 is currently playing exclusively in theaters.
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