He’s brought the world a creeping deadly fog, a parasitic Antarctic alien and some of the most iconic slashers of all time, but recently the pioneering director and composer John Carpenter set his eyes on something a little sweeter. Late last year he quietly unveiled a line of small-batch chocolate bars with Sandy King, his wife and creative partner.
“You know, sometimes doors open and I just walk through them and go, ‘Why not?’” said King, who spearheads the candy project and founded Storm King Productions and Comics. “If we can do it well, why not?… With everything, you want to please the audience, whether it’s a movie, a book, a podcast or a candy bar, and if everybody’s smiling, that’s it.”
King and Carpenter met on the set of Carpenter’s 1984 “Starman” and have served as each other’s partners and sounding boards for movies, TV shows, podcasts and comic books ever since, but this is their first food venture together.
They launched the chocolates last October at New York Comic Con, and now the bars can be found at their traveling booths at comic and horror conventions. They’re also sold at select comic shops throughout the country and in Burbank’s Horror Boodega, a nostalgic and scary-movie-themed snack shop.
The hefty, nearly half-pound bars come in two flavors: John Carpenter’s Boo Bar is milk chocolate crunchy with potato chips and Pop Rocks, and the Dark & Stormy is dark chocolate laden with candied ginger and toffee and named in ode to King’s comics and production companies.
Carpenter and King have preferred to keep their batches small and their marketing limited to word of mouth, but that word is spreading, especially across their ravenous genre-loving fan base.
“Horror people like to eat,” King said. “Horror people enjoy life. They’re not what other people think we are; I think that there’s a great deal of joy and gentleness in the horror community, and they like to share, and they’re kind to each other. It’s a natural progression to say, ‘I found something cool: Have a candy bar.’”
The idea came about one afternoon in 2024, when a conversation with their L.A. neighbor turned to the topic of Halloween. Wouldn’t it be fun, the neighbor said, if the Carpenters had their own brand of candy to hand out? Instead of fashioning bite-size bars for trick-or-treaters, they began conceptualizing full-size bars.
King and Carpenter didn’t know the first thing about making chocolate, but agreed that they wanted to offer more unique flavors as opposed to competing with the classic and more established brands.
These potato chip and Pop Rocks chocolate bars from John Carpenter and his wife and business partner, Sandy King, launched late last year.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
King began researching chocolatiers throughout the country and requesting samples. That same neighbor tipped her off to Asher’s Chocolate Co., an 1892-founded, fifth-generation sweets company in Pennsylvania. While nearby making an appearance at a convention, King noticed Asher’s chocolate in her hotel room and detoured to one of its factories in July 2025.
“I felt it lived up to European chocolate, that it was really high-quality in both the milk chocolate and the dark chocolate,” she said. “The whole place had a great vibe. Everybody working there was or seemed really happy. Everybody was respected … I went through every part of the factory, saw the refrigerators, how they were all labeled, how they made each bar or each truffle or each chocolate-dipped potato chip.”
Asher’s, while primarily responsible for its own brand of chocolate bars and other assortments, will occasionally produce chocolate for bands, brands, charities and other companies.
Barton McBride, the vice president of Asher’s business development, felt King’s request was an obvious “yes” from the company’s perspective.
“I’m not a huge horror fan,” he said. “Nonetheless, anybody of a reasonable age recognizes John Carpenter and what he has done within the world of film and music. It was kind of a no-brainer that if nothing else, this will draw some different eyes to the brand, and it’s fun. Fortunately the [Asher] family still makes a good number of their decisions based first and foremost on whether it’ll be fun. Because in their words, ‘Chocolate’s meant to be fun.’”
King and Carpenter wanted to manufacture two varieties: milk chocolate, generally preferred by the directing icon, and dark chocolate, King’s favorite. King said they went through six rounds of flavor testing to land on their Boo Bar and Dark & Stormy.
When developing their bars, they’d ask for feedback from anyone and everyone, including their neighbors and staff in their office. They’d ask for first impressions, but more viscerally, they’d watch their faces to see who was instantly smiling.
Because Carpenter reaches for all of the concession-stand classics — M&Ms, Red Vines, Hershey’s bars — they wanted to incorporate fun, nostalgic, textural elements. That’s why the milk-chocolate Boo Bar is packed with Pop Rocks and potato chips. King, who describes herself as “a dark-chocolate fanatic” as well as “a ginger fanatic,” helped steer their Dark & Stormy to nubs of dried ginger and toffee chips.
And while Carpenter is almost always a fan of milk chocolate, one night King caught him downing her Dark & Stormy bars.
Instead of gushing “blood” red syrup, they wove their love of horror through the art and branding. The Boo Bar is labeled “John Carpenter’s,” just like one of his films. “The Boys” co-creator Darick Robertson illustrated the grinning gargoyle on its label.
The chocolates can be hard to track down. “We’re like the creeping unknown,” King joked, adding, “We have them next to our checkout counter [at conventions], and for people they’re a novelty item. Then they eat them and they come back the next day and buy more for their friends.”
Lately, sales have been picking up; they sold out of Boo Bars at this year’s New York Comic Con, much to the dismay of Carpenter’s sweet tooth. They want to expand their reach by selling the chocolate in more comic shops and possibly old-school moviehouses, where fans of their horror films can grab a few bars to enjoy during screenings. They’d love to sell them online, but given the year’s increasing temperatures, the team hasn’t entirely solved direct-to-consumer shipping.
In addition to the year-round home at the Horror Boodega, King and Carpenter will be bringing the bars to Melrose Avenue’s Golden Apple Comics for their now sold-out Sunday appearance, where they’ll be signing their annual release of “John Carpenter’s Tales For A HalloweeNight” anthology.
King has daydreamed about adding a white chocolate bar to their lineup, but then joked that those fans are heathens. Scaling up with two varieties is proving difficult enough.
“I can’t picture being Sprinkles cupcakes,” she said. “We’re a little more plain-wrapped than that. We stick to what makes us laugh.”
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