Firestarter score composed by John Carpenter is now available for pre-order, sample track is online

When the trailer for the Stephen King adaptation Firestarter arrived online a couple months ago, it was revealed that the legendary John Carpenter had composed for the score for the Universal Pictures / Blumhouse Productions film. Copies of the score are now available for pre-order at THIS LINK, and a track has been released online! You can listen to it by clicking play on the embed at the bottom of this article.

While the score won’t be released until October, Firestarter is set to reach theatres and the Peacock streaming service on May 13th.

Directed by Keith Thomas (The Vigil) from a screenplay by Halloween Kills co-writer Scott Teems, the film is based on the 1980 Stephen King novel Firestarter (buy a copy HERE). It has the following synopsis:  

In a new adaptation of Stephen King’s classic thriller from the producers of The Invisible Man, a girl with extraordinary pyrokinetic powers fights to protect her family and herself from sinister forces that seek to capture and control her.

For more than a decade, parents Andy and Vicky have been on the run, desperate to hide their daughter Charlie from a shadowy federal agency that wants to harness her unprecedented gift for creating fire into a weapon of mass destruction. Andy has taught Charlie how to defuse her power, which is triggered by anger or pain. But as Charlie turns 11, the fire becomes harder and harder to control. After an incident reveals the family’s location, a mysterious operative is deployed to hunt down the family and seize Charlie once and for all. Charlie has other plans.

Ryan Kiera Armstrong (American Horror Story) stars as “firestarter” Charlie McGee. She is joined in the cast by Zac Efron (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile) as Charlie’s father Andy, Sydney Lemmon (Fear the Walking Dead) as Charlie’s mother and Andy’s wife Vicky, Michael Greyeyes (Blood Quantum) as the assassin Rainbird, and Gloria Reuben (ER) in an unspecified lead role. Kurtwood Smith (RoboCop) and John Beasley (The Purge: Anarchy) are in the film as well.

This Firestarter is coming to us from Blumhouse, Weed Road Productions, and Universal Pictures. Blumhouse founder Jason Blum is producing with Akiva Goldsman. The late Martha De Laurentiis served as executive producer alongside Teems, Ryan Turek, Gregory Lessans, J.D. Lifshitz, and Raphael Margules.. At one time, Goldsman had been attached to direct the film, and at another point Fatih Akin was going to direct it.

Carpenter very nearly directed an adaptation of Firestarter back in the 1980s. Released in ’84, that movie ended up being directed by Mark L. Lester and starred Drew Barrymore, David Keith, Heather Locklear, Martin Sheen, George C. Scott, Louise Fletcher, and Art Carney. You can buy it HERE.

Carpenter composed the score for the new Firestarter with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, who also composed the scores for Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills with him. There’s a bit of leftover sound from their Halloween tracks in this Firestarter piece: