In the spirit of the season, we have been re-watching the original Halloween series of movies. And in some ways, the most intriguing one is Halloween III.

It’s an odd one as it has nothing to do with the first two, or the Michael Meyers saga at all. It’s a standalone story that follows the uncovering of a rather ominous plot by a successful Halloween mask company. In some ways, the movie is a bit of mess, particularly when it comes to characters and storyline. But putting aside those, it is full of some interesting sound an imagery.

This is no more so than in the opening credits. Rather than the iconic 5/4 theme from the first two movies, we open with some low analog-synth tones, and simple pixelated computer graphics that is gradually revealed to be a Jack-o-Lantern.

I was curious how these were done. The synthesizer sounded like a Prophet; the graphics were a mystery. Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to find out that John Carpenter indeed used a Prophet 10 as the main synth, along with a Prophet 5, a LinnDrum, and an ARP analog sequencer.

I don’t have a Prophet 10 handy. Very few people do. It was a massive synth that was essentially two Prophet 5 engines in a large package with two keyboard manuals and a wooden finish. I did have the opportunity to play one once at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum.

At CatSynth HQ, I have Cherry Audio’s P-10, a great re-creation of the original. We did a review for CatSynth TV back when it came out.

It came with two “Carpenter” presets. One was a beautiful, undulating drone with noise and filter details. The other combined a bass synth with a minor arpeggios. Of course, these referenced not only the Halloween series but also Carpenter’s other films of the era, like The Thing. I had quite a bit of fun improvising with these after watching the film, in particular “Carpenter Soundscape” by our friend James Dyson. I recorded a bit of what I did, which you can see and hear in this short.

Finding out about the computer graphics required a bit more digging. I did find this interview on the website The Art of the Title with designer John Walsh.

“The Halloween III animation was fairly simple. I enlarged the logo that production used for their TV spots and had it printed out on a grid. That made it simple to manually generate X and Y data for the logo. The program that animated the reveal of the scan lines was written in Fortran. I could control the speed of the lines as they animated onto the screen, and did several detail animations of different parts of the logo, as well as the entire pumpkin.”

The program was run on Cromemco Z-2D computer, an early microcomputer that used a Zilog Z80 processor and S100 bus, and ran the CP/M operating system. In many ways, it was similar to the Zenith Z89 that I used as a kid in the early 80s, but Walsh’s Z-2D apparently supported color graphics. I thought it was interesting that he used Fortran rather than BASIC, but either was a perfectly good option for CP/M systems of the time. It would be interesting to recreate this on an emulator, though to get the true effect, one would need to run it with a big old CRT monitor and film it.

In addition to the opening credits, there was the sinister company town of Santa Mira, a strong visual element, and a character in its own right. Although the town is fictional it was sound in the very real tiny town Loleta, California, just south of Eureka.

[NoeHill, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

I will have to stop there next time I head up to Eureka and the north coast.