HALLOWEEN's transfer to DVD was a labor of love for Alan Howarth. The effort began when Howarth, who scored most of the HALLOWEEN sequels and worked extensively with John Carpenter, approached executive producer Joe Wolf to release a 20th Anniversary CD. After completing the disc and hearing that HALLOWEEN was getting remastered for DVD, Howarth suggested what a great idea it would be to put the film's soundtrack in 5.1 Digital.

But the job wasn't as easy as turning mono into stereo. "We searched Joe's archives, Debra's archives, Irwin Yablans' archives...," says Howarth, who started playing music on a saxophone. "And could not find the seperations, which would be a seperate track of just music only, just dialogue only, just sound effects only. All we could find was the original mono.So I did a mix of the DVD almost a year ago. I tried to use the original HALLOWEEN soundtrack and sweeten it - add to it without changing the original mix. I was trying to smooth music and re-sychronize music. It was a very nasty job."

Part of the problem was the original soundtrack. For mysterious reasons, the music did synchronize correctly with the movie. "The tape recorder that the original stuff was done on was an old Ampex, which had tension problems. If you played the tape on that machine, everything was on speed and correct. But unless I could find that exact machine, all the tempos were off."

After a quick fix, things began rolling for Howarth. "It finally got down to DVD mastering and there were some phasing problems. Another fellow jumped in named Bill Lustig, from Anchor Bay, and actully found at Warner Bros (!) the serpeate dialogue and effects. We had the chance to do it right."

But time was growing short, so the group decided to take the remastering job to a company called Chace Productions. "That's their business, doing all these restorations. They took the original 3-strike [the three seperate tracks] and did a computer no-noise digital cleanup. Now you can have dialogue in the middle and have a car pass by from left to right. When the dialogue and effects were married together, you couldn't do any of that stuff. So that's the 5.1 DVD. I did some subtle things that I had John's [Carpenter] blessing on. I added some wind. I added some thunder in the original Loomis car scene. It's much bigger and darker than the original."

Speaking of Carpenter, Howarth had lunch with him recently. Is there any chance the two will work together again? "I always extend out the invitation," Howarth smiles. But, he says, Carpenter has other relationships in place. "Especially the one with Dave Davies of the Kinks. Dave's son actually lives in John's house as a buddy of his son, kind of taking him under their wing. John's obviously far enough along that he doesn't need me anymore," Howarth laughs."I proposed to him that we go into all the soundtracks from the 80's that we did and see about remastering them and reissuing them. The masters are still good."

Howarth admits how well he worked with Carpenter. "I'm not a classicly trained guy, I'm a rock dude. John Caprenter and I are the same age, 51. We're people who are influenced by the same cultural stuff. I'm from Ohio, he's from Kentucky."

"They put the microscope on this thing," Howarth says about HALLOWEEN's THX approval. "A change of mono to stereo is a little bit of a game to play. It came out so good, there was some discussion at the end of doing a theatrical re-release. Which still may happen. There's still some discussion. It's a matter of money and Miramax and who knows what."

Howarth, who sat in on the final mix, is happy with the way it turned out. "It's everything HALLOWEEN could ever be. Image-wise, they got to an original transfer of an IP, which is ahead of color correction. If ever there was a definitive version, it's over forever, you don't need to ever do it again, it's this DVD."

Moving on from HALLOWEEN, Howarth is currently working on scoring the film OMEGA CODE, a film based on the Tora being a code that spells out special messages. Also on the horizon is an album with his new partner, John Nevello, called "Out of Our Minds," which will be jazz-oriented.