John Carpenter

Abstract

John Carpenter (b. 1948) belongs to a group of celebrated neo-horror (or new wave horror) filmmakers who are associated with the genre’s renaissance in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Beginning as a feature director with the science fiction film Dark Star (1974), Carpenter became noted for a period of extraordinary creativity between 1978 and 1982, when his most seminal movies—Halloween (1978), Escape from New York (1981), and The Thing (1982)—were made. Working within a post-classical Hollywood, Carpenter is a director of a generation, who, like his contemporaries Joe Dante, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese, is knowledgeable of the studio system and the screen greats that had gone before. The versatile filmmaker Howard Hawks was a particular inspiration to Carpenter, who was similarly comfortable moving between genres, directing, for instance, the science fiction–romance Starman (1984) and the music biopic Elvis (1979). Carpenter even employed Hawks’s siege narratives for his productions and subsequently translated the Hawksian western into a number of his films, as evidenced in the urban thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and the Gothic horror Vampires (1998). For Carpenter is a confident and uninhibited filmmaker who cleverly employs a “B” movie aesthetic that sees him adapting and recombining genres. This is perhaps most explicitly identified in the middle period of his career and the films Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Prince of Darkness (1987), and They Live (1988). Unfortunately, it has led to his films being both applauded and dismissed. After the disappointment of Ghosts of Mars (2001), he was to make just one further feature, the hospital horror The Ward (2010). The impact, however, of his earlier work is evident in his cult following and the industry’s attempts to remake and revisit several of his films – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog (1979), The Thing. In addition to directing twenty-one features, Carpenter was often the scriptwriter, and he composed the music, for the majority of his films, which has helped reignite his career in recent years. A CD of new music, John Carpenter’s Lost Themes, was released in 2014, followed by John Carpenter’s Lost Themes II (2016). These compositions have subsequently been combined with his earlier iconic film scores and promoted in concerts where Carpenter performs live with his band while clips from his films are projected on a giant screen. He had played in a rock ’n’ roll band in his youth, but in many ways this career change later in his life has been unexpected. For such an influential filmmaker, scholarly and critical material is surprisingly lacking. It is a consequence perhaps of Carpenter’s uneven career, with a handful of his films having received much of the attention.