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John Carpenter's New Music Video Takes You On A Virtual Reality Highway

It's like 'Escape from New York,' but with a modern VR update, in Gavin Hignight and Ben Verulst's video for "Night."
GIF by the author, via

The mind behind Halloween, Escape From New York, They Live, and many more, rarely steps in front of the camera—aside from a host of uncredited cameos—but in Gavin Hignight and Ben Verulst's new music video for "Night," legendary director and composer John Carpenter gets front and center wearing an Oculus Rift-style VR headset.

In the video, for a track off of his recent Lost Themes LPCarpenter takes the wheel of a sleek black muscle car, and plows through a cinematic cityscape. It evokes the dark streets and darker characters from his films, starring a mysterious, leather-clad character who's only an eyepatch and wild mane of hair away from Escape from New York's Snake Plissken. The song's moody, electronic soundscape creates a cinematic atmosphere for the video's silhouetted skyscrapers and endless open roads.

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Like VICE's illustrated reactions to the album, these images are built entirely on Hignight and Verulst's first impression of the song. "Upon Hearing 'Night' by John Carpenter my head was instantly filled with these nighttime highway road dreamscapes," Hignight explains, "someone or something, haunted, traveling the road alone in the late hours. Our goal was to take that feeling and put it into a video that paid tribute to the film work of Carpenter but at the same time gave him a new world to play in… in this case, literally through virtual reality."

Check out John Carpenter's "Night" below:

Screencaps via

Learn more about John Carpenter's current work on his website.

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