John Carpenter has released Cathedral, his first graphic novel and a companion soundtrack album, marking his first new visual project since 2010 and his first soundtrack tied to his own fiction in 25 years. The project matters because it combines the horror director’s filmmaking sensibility with comics and music, offering fans an audio-visual work in the absence of a new Carpenter film.

The story was inspired by an unusually elaborate dream, drawing heavily on Greek mythology, in which three police investigators enter a demonic underworld after a police officer is murdered in an abandoned church. Carpenter made the heavy-metal-leaning album with his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies; the graphic novel was produced with his wife Sandy King, writer Sean Sobczak, artists Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna, colourist Sian Mandrake and letterer Marshall Dillon. The book was released on 4 August and the Sacred Bones Records soundtrack followed on 7 August.