John Carpenter and horror films go together like Michael Myers and big kitchen knife, but if you
dive deep into his filmography, you'll find a surprisingly eclectic body of work, populated
with sci-fi comedies, space voyage parodies, alien romances, and even a musical biopic.
In 1995, Carpenter released Village Of The Damned - a remake of the 1960 sci-fi horror
classic of the same name, about a strange group of children born out of a supernatural
event who then begin to hold their small town hostage with psychic abilities and an
apparent lack of humanity. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Christopher Reeve,
Mark Hamill, Kirstie Alley, Meredith Salenger, and more,
along with plenty of spooky atmosphere courtesy of Carpenter's ever-present widescreen camera.
Let's be clear: Village of the Damned may be at the bottom of this list,
but it is by no means a terrible film. It's got buckets of atmosphere,
a compelling cast, and when the Spooky Kids are doing their Spooky Kid stuff,
it sucks you in. That said, the film is among Carpenter's slowest-moving endeavors.
It seems to creep from horror beat to horror beat in the worst way, leaving long stretches where
the viewer is less than compelled. Carpenter once said Village of the Damned was a film he
wasn't particularly passionate about making. Revisiting it all these years later, it shows.
Ghosts of Mars, one of Carpenter's last directorial efforts to date, is the story of a
group of police officers on Mars in a future where humanity has terraformed the Red Planet and set
up a society there. The cops are just supposed to be picking up a notorious prisoner for transport,
but when they arrive at their destination, they find that ancient Martian spirits have emerged
to possess every human in sight, and they have no choice but to fight their way out.
It's basically Assault on Precinct 13 with space ghosts, and while that's fun
in some form no matter how you slice it, Ghosts of Mars is never quite as fun as it
seems to think it is. Carpenter was aiming for deliberate sci-fi action camp with this film,
and he definitely hits his mark more often than not. The trouble is that the campy
tropes often repeat themselves, the film's visual effects can't rise to the occasion,
and even the intentionally over-the-top stuff doesn't always register that way.
"That's beautiful."
The result is an uneven but fun little sci-fi thriller that,
while far from Carpenter's best, is still worth seeing for the frequent appearances
of Martian ghosts who seem to be followed by heavy metal guitars everywhere they go.
John Carpenter's latest directorial effort to date is this period horror piece about a group
of girls in a mental institution who are stalked by a supernatural killer. The Ward was released in
2010, but it retains a certain timeless quality -- the setting is straightforward enough that
Carpenter could have made it at any point in his career. The atmospheric photography and
pacing are classic, and they make the film worth seeking out for fans of the master.
Unfortunately, the atmosphere is not enough to overcome The Ward's formulaic story,
which builds to a twist that not only has been done before in other horror films,
but done better. Even if the twist did land in a more satisfying way, the film also lacks the fine
strokes of character building that Carpenter executed so well in some of his better work,
so the film's resolution doesn't pay off as well as it could have. That said,
the central antagonist of the film is decidedly creepy, and when The Ward is in full scare mode,
it's clear that Carpenter hasn't lost a step in that department.
Between Halloween and The Fog, Carpenter took a couple of gigs as a TV movie director,
and of those two, Elvis is the most ambitious. Released less than two years after the King of
Rock 'n' Roll's death, the film is an epic look at Elvis Presley's life from his childhood up
until the beginning of his Las Vegas era. Starring in the title role is Kurt Russell,
marking the beginning of his long collaboration with Carpenter.
Though it perhaps feels out of place amid his most famous films,
Carpenter is no less gifted when it comes to telling the story of Elvis Presley,
and it certainly helped matters that he had someone as charismatic as Russell leading the way.
Elvis works as what it is, which is a very straightforward made-for-TV biopic with a
few kinks that are never quite ironed out. These days it might only be sought out by
Elvis superfans and Carpenter completionists, but the director did his job and he did it well.
Carpenter's other major TV movie gig in the late 1970s was this straightforward thriller about
a live TV director who takes a new job in Los Angeles. She moves into a sleek new high-rise
apartment building, only to find that she's also attracted a terrifying new stalker in the process.
"I'll find you. I don't give up."
Carpenter has been compared to Alfred Hitchcock in terms of the way he builds and releases tension,
and Someone's Watching Me! might be the most straightforward showcase of his Hitchcockian
gifts in his entire filmography. The film plays in some places like a riff on Rear Window,
and Carpenter's screenplay is full of the kind of witty banter that you could
easily imagine someone like Grace Kelly or Tippi Hedren rattling off.
It's also chock full of tension, and the lead performances from Lauren Hutton and Adrienne
Barbeau are consistently compelling. It's not as flashy or ambitious as Carpenter's best work,
but Someone's Watching Me! still works as a well-executed TV thriller.
There aren't a lot of sequels in John Carpenter's filmography, perhaps because
of his bad experience with trying to deliver follow-ups to Halloween in the late 1970s and
early '80s. But 15 years after Escape from New York hit theaters, Carpenter decided to
return to that post-apocalyptic world and its eyepatch-clad hero, Snake Plissken.
Escape from L.A. is set 16 years after the original, and follows Snake as he is once
again offered a shot at freedom if he's willing to help the United States government by completing a
near-impossible mission with a ticking clock. This time around he's sent into Los Angeles,
which has become an island thanks to an earthquake years earlier, and which has been transformed into
another prison wasteland thanks to a new president who has ushered in a theocracy.
The film works best when Carpenter is playing in the new sandbox of ambitious dystopian ideas
he's built for himself, but the film never quite coalesces in the way that its predecessor did.
"This is insane."
"It is. That's the point."
There are a lot of interesting things happening in this movie, and Russell is charismatic as ever,
but it suffers by virtue of being a sequel to one of the great cult sci-fi films.
If any Carpenter film deserves the title of "Most Underrated," it might be Memoirs
of an Invisible Man, a movie that seems to have been all but forgotten amid Carpenter's
more high-profile efforts, but deserves to be remembered. The film stars Chevy Chase as Nick,
a stock analyst whose life is upended when he goes to a shareholders meeting at a tech firm
and, as the result of an accident, wakes up to find himself invisible.
With a government agent on his trail and a new love interest wondering what happened to him,
Nick has to figure out how to adjust to life as an unseen presence.
Though it suffers from a lot of formulaic story beats, Carpenter is clearly having fun
spinning a noir-influenced tale of a man recounting his own zany sci-fi adventures,
and Chase pours a considerable amount of screen presence into his performance,
even when you can't see him. Throw in some wonderful and very playful visual effects,
and Memoirs of an Invisible Man is a sci-fi comedy that deserves to be seen by more people.
Carpenter's first feature film is this strange sci-fi spoof from 1974,
which began as a student film and later evolved into a theatrically-released
effort that remains impressive in its ingenuity and comedic sensibility.
Co-written by Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, Dark Star follows the crew of the titular starship
on a long-term mission into deep space where everything seems to be going wrong.
"Um… the planet just exploded, sir."
Dark Star is a parody of ponderous science fiction fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
As a result, plot points include everything from a commander in cryogenic stasis as the
result of an accident to an artificially intelligent bomb that keeps trying to
drop itself out of the ship and detonate due to an error. It drags in places and
certainly plays as amateurish in others, but you can see the talent at work here.
It's not just "good for a student film" - it's genuinely fun, inventive, and subversive.
The long story of how Starman finally made it to the screen is almost as interesting
as the film itself, which follows a widow who encounters an alien being
who assumes the form of her late husband upon arriving on Earth.
The film went through various permutations and numerous directors on its way to the screen.
By the time Carpenter got hold of it, he was eager to make a film that allowed him
to break out of the particular genre mold he'd worked himself into by the mid-1980s,
and saw Starman as an opportunity to do a cross-country love story with sci-fi elements.
The result is a slow burning, beautifully photographed film
that allows Carpenter to do things like portray the majesty of the country and
mine the seemingly infinite charm Karen Allen can convey with a single smile.
It's far from the most thrilling thing Carpenter ever produced, but he did what he set out to do.
Starman is a warm, lingering sci-fi love story anchored by two compelling stars.
John Carpenter is at his best when he's working with a killer conceptual hook,
and Vampires is another example of that. It's far from his best high-concept genre flick,
but when this mean little movie - about vampire hunters and a master blood drinker intent on
ending the world - is really cooking, it's among Carpenter's most fun outings.
The film follows master vampire hunter Jack Crow and his crew of Vatican-sanctioned slayers as they
try to root out a master vampire who's angling to perform an ancient ritual that will blot out
the sun forever, turning Earth into a vampire's paradise. The film kicks off as Crow and his
team are raiding a vampire nest, establishing the rules of the game, and then we get to watch
as Carpenter methodically dismantles everything we think we know about how this game is played.
It's part horror film and part Western showdown, and while it doesn't pack the
same level of tension and emotional investment as his best work, Vampires is still a blast to watch.
Do you like Creepshow? Do you like John Carpenter? Do you ever wish
John Carpenter had directed some of Creepshow? If so, Body Bags is definitely for you.
Carpenter and fellow horror legend Tobe Hooper teamed up for this horror comedy anthology film,
which aired on Showtime in 1993, and the result is a fun collection of spooky
stories that's pretty much Carpenter's version of Creepshow, in a very good way.
Carpenter directed two of the film's three segments, "The Gas Station" and "Hair,"
and also starred as the "The Coroner," a master of ceremonies in the vein of the Cryptkeeper,
who introduces the segments from a morgue where he's working late.
Though it displays a predictable unevenness between the various segments,
Body Bags is an immensely fun look at what happens when two horror masters get together
with some of their friends - including cameos from Wes Craven, Roger Corman,
Sam Raimi and more - and essentially just get to goof off with a handful of scary stories.
In Halloween, Carpenter played with the idea of an academic who'd come to the conclusion that
evil was a real, tangible thing that couldn't be reasoned with or effectively analyzed.
Prince of Darkness, the second film in Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy,"
is an effort to further explore this same idea,
as well as Carpenter's fascination with the intersection of faith and science.
The film follows a group of academics who are brought into a church to examine a strange
cylinder that purportedly contains the physical embodiment of Satan.
As the film progresses, they slowly become aware that the evil within the container is real,
and that it wants out. Prince of Darkness is packed with intense horror moments, from a
man dissolving into a pile of insects to a woman transforming into the embodiment of evil on Earth.
It's one of Carpenter's best exercises in pure terror, and one of his most ambitious.
Christine is, to date, the only time that John Carpenter's storytelling sensibilities have met
up with Stephen King's, and the result is a horror classic. Christine is, as fans will know, the name
of a car that a young man named Arnie Cunningham buys against the advice of everyone in his life.
“Look, I'm buying her, I don't care what you say."
"Your funeral, man."
As Arnie begins to fix up the car, he becomes obsessed with it,
and Christine starts to take on a mind of her own.
So, Christine is the haunted car movie, which means the movie doesn't work if you can't create
a world in which the car is truly scary. Carpenter pulls it off through late night
scenes of the driverless Christine ripping through the streets to run down her victims,
and through some unforgettable visual effects which further drive home the
supernatural prowess of this beautiful and deadly machine. Christine is a slasher movie on wheels,
and in a world where so many high concepts that work on paper fail on the big screen,
this time that's actually as good as it sounds.
After nailing the slasher movie with Halloween in 1978, Carpenter and his creative partner
Debra Hill turned to ghost stories for their next feature film. The result was The Fog,
co-written by Hill and Carpenter, with Hill also acting as producer while Carpenter directed.
The Fog is, in many ways, a classic vengeful spirit story, documenting the supernatural
terrors that befall the town of Antonio Bay on its 100th anniversary. The date also happens to be the
100th anniversary of a great injustice upon which the town was founded. While the vengeful spirit
side of things is a bit formulaic, Carpenter knocks it out of the park with the atmospherics.
From the opening minutes of the film, in which paranormal events start slowly creeping into
town ahead of the fog, to the terrifying climax featuring a band of rotting ghosts in a church,
The Fog is a beautifully shot small-town nightmare with a fantastic ensemble cast
that includes Hal Halbrook, Adrienne Barbeau,
and Jamie Lee Curtis. It doesn't quite have Halloween's energy, but it shows Carpenter
and Hill maturing as horror storytellers, and it’s a masterpiece in its own right.
The last film in Carpenter's thematically linked "Apocalypse Trilogy," In the Mouth
of Madness is both a tribute to horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and Carpenter's exploration of the often
frightening links between fiction and reality. The film follows an insurance investigator who
is tasked with tracking down a bestselling horror novelist, who's gone missing along
with the manuscript to his next book. His search leads him to a New England town that's supposed
to only exist on the page, but which seems to be coming to frightening life all around him.
"He sees you. He sees you. He sees you."
"What?"
Sam Neill is predictably fantastic in the lead role, portraying a man who's slowly unraveling
with convincing intensity, and Carpenter is clearly delighting in showing us a Lovecraftian
tale of madness and doom in all its glory. In the Mouth of Madness builds and builds much like one
of Lovecraft's own stories, unfolding first as a strange mystery and then exploding into
monstrous ecstasy by the end. It may not stand tall with the very best of Carpenter's films,
but it's still very good, and certainly ranks among his most ambitious visions of horror.
Carpenter's second feature film is also the first of several of his movies to ultimately
get the remake treatment, as well as the film that earned him the kind of attention that later led to
Halloween. It's also a cult masterclass in how to do low-budget suspense right.
Assault on Precinct 13 is set almost entirely in the titular police precinct, where a pair of
cops and a pair of administrative workers are preparing to close up the facility entirely so
the precinct can move to a new location. Before they can do that, though, a traumatized man runs
in looking for help after killing a member of a local street gang. The gang, already angered by
a recent massacre of their people by the LAPD, declare all-out war, and the people inside the
precinct prepare to try and survive the night as bloodthirsty criminals close in on them.
Stripped down, tightly plotted and full of tense moments, Assault on Precinct 13
is Carpenter's first showcase of his gift for suspense and inventively staged action.
All the great stuff we'd later see in films like The Thing and The Fog exists
in an early form here, and it still holds up more than 40 years later.
Carpenter's best attempt at pure sci-fi adventure arrived in 1981, when he and co-writer Nick Castle
dreamed up a new future in which the island of Manhattan has been converted into a super
prison where the prisoners set up their own twisted version of society. They also dreamed
up one of the most memorable antiheroes in genre movie history: Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken.
"You gonna kill me now, Snake?"
"I'm too tired. Maybe later."
Escape from New York is set up with a relatively simple action movie premise:
Snake has 22 hours to go into Manhattan and rescue the President of the United States. If he fails,
he dies. What makes Escape such an engrossing, memorable film is all in the journey,
as Carpenter lays out in constantly engaging details the ways in which a new world has been
built among the ruins of old Manhattan. As Snake encounters character after character,
we get a clearer picture of what his weird mirror image of society has become,
all culminating in his encounter with the Duke of New York. Funny, ingenuous,
and beautifully realized, Escape from New York still ranks among the great dystopian films.
Carpenter followed up Starman in 1986 with Big Trouble in Little China, another film he
didn't write but hoped to use as a platform to prove that he was more than just the horror guy.
This time, Carpenter hoped to translate his love of kung fu movies into his own work, and
the result is a film that's both very different from the surrounding movies in his filmography,
and also indicative of the same kind of swagger he displayed with They Live and Escape from New York.
Of course, if you want to make a film with swagger, having Kurt Russell along for the
ride never hurts. In his fourth collaboration with Carpenter, Russell shines as Jack Burton,
a trucker who's roped into an unexpected supernatural conflict among two very old
Chinese factions. Russell's in-over-his-head action hero style is what anchors the film,
but Carpenter's also clearly having a blast through the various scenes of magical martial
arts mayhem. There's a reason Big Trouble in Little China continues to find new audiences.
It might contain more pure popcorn fun than any other Carpenter flick.
Though he's mostly thought of as a horror master, Carpenter's made almost as many
classic films in the realm of science fiction as he has in that of pure scares,
often overlapping the two to great effect. They Live is more sci-fi than horror,
but Carpenter also turned all of his creature feature powers on for this story of an everyman
wanderer who comes upon a pair of sunglasses that reveal to him the terrible truth about the world:
that humanity is being subliminally controlled by a horrific aliens in human disguises.
"Our impulses are being redirected.
We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep."
Roddy Piper, best known at the time as a wrestler, is fantastic in the lead role of
Nada, and watching him go toe-to-toe with Keith David's Frank throughout the film is great fun.
The alien "ghouls" at the center of the conspiracy in the film are at various points terrifying and
hilarious, sometimes walking the line between those extremes to great effect. What really sets
They Live apart as a cult classic, though, is that it's Carpenter's most finely-tuned
piece of social commentary. The anti-consumerist allegories he's working with are not too subtle,
but he hits every note with savage perfection. It's a wickedly gleeful gem of a movie.
Halloween is the stuff of indie filmmaking legend. Made with just $300,000 on a very short schedule
and starring a then relatively untested Jamie Lee Curtis, the film ultimately
became one of the most profitable movies ever made, and launched a franchise that's
still kicking more than 40 years later. It also reshaped the horror genre for decades to come.
Though there are certain elements of its DIY production style that can still be nitpicked
today, Halloween is that rare horror film that actually lives up to all the hype,
even if you're watching it for the first time decades after it was first released.
Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill do so much with so little, crafting a spooky little
world in Haddonfield, Illinois and then filling it with characters we truly like,
only to wrap the knots of tension around their necks and tighten them until they snap.
From the opening Steadicam shot to those final, ominous moments,
Halloween remains a landmark film that's often imitated but very, very rarely matched.
A research station in the middle of nowhere, a group of men in way over their heads,
and an alien organism that can take the form of anything it touches with often gruesome results.
These are the elements that launch John Carpenter's grand masterpiece,
a film so thick with paranoia and so packed with awesome gore effects that,
no matter how many times you've seen it, you somehow always end up on the edge of your seat.
"You're gonna have to sleep sometime, MacReady."
"I'm a real light sleeper, Childs."
There are so many things to love about The Thing,
Carpenter's love letter to sci-fi creature features, but the thing most people gravitate to
right away is visual effects master Rob Bottin's otherworldly creature effects. The film is packed
with unforgettable moments of gore and mutated mayhem, from defibrillator paddles disappearing
into a chest to a severed head growing legs and antennae and scuttling off into the darkness.
Carpenter takes to directing these sequences with a natural flair, but his talent for suspense
particularly shines in the moments between the gore. The scene in which MacReady ties his friends
up so he can test their blood one-by-one is a masterful exercise in paranoid tension,
as is the film's apocalyptic final scene. It's a brilliant exercise in terror from start to finish,
and the brightest spot in a filmography full of great genre work.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Looper videos about your favorite movies are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.