"I killed him."
"But you can't kill the boogeyman!"
You know you’re watching a John Carpenter film if...
Carpenter tells you you’re watching a John Carpenter film.
Carpenter has incorporated his name into most of his films’ titles,
starting with his third feature, Halloween.
There’s more than vanity to this.
Carpenter grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky,
and started making his own movies at an early age.
He particularly admired directors with strong directorial touches,
like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, and especially Howard Hawks.
"I sorta wish you hadn't done that Hildy."
"Done what?"
"Divorced me.
Makes a fellow lose all faith in himself,
gives him uh, almost gives him a feeling he wasn't wanted."
Filmmakers whose work could not be mistaken for anyone else’s.
Incorporating his name into the title ties him to a tradition of auteurs
who took top-to-bottom responsibility for their films.
It establishes an unsettling atmosphere from the start.
Over the past decade, Carpenter has emerged as
a major influence on a generation of creators
who grew up watching his movies.
"You know what that is?"
"No, what?"
"Melted plastic and microwaved bubblegum."
"No way."
David Gordon Green has said he would not have directed
his new Halloween sequel without Carpenter’s blessing.
"The bus crashed."
"Michael Myers escaped."
Adam Wingard’s The Guest is one of many recent thrillers
to play like feature-length homages to Carpenter.
"While we had him under study, he killed several people and escaped.
Then he burned their bodies to confuse us.
We thought he'd died in the fire initially,
but by the time we figured out what he'd done,
the trail was cold."
"Maybe you shouldn't have tested your procedures on a psychopath."
And of course, Carpenter’s work is very much a part of the DNA
of Stranger Things, from the look of the show to its score.
What’s made his work so haunting and enduring?
To begin with, Carpenter understands the value of setting the scene.
He lingers on an image a beat or two longer than most directors would,
creating a sense of the unfamiliar
even when filming otherwise mundane surroundings.
In Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter builds tension from
the image of an empty parking lot, one we know could be filled
at any moment by a vicious gang.
Halloween contains scenes of a seemingly idyllic American suburb,
then twists that imagery by dropping a masked killer in its midst.
"It was the boogeyman."
Prince of Darkness turns a downtown Los Angeles church
into a place of dread both outside, as a group of zombie-like homeless
residents surround it, and in, as a group of scientists begin to
suspect that a strange substance might be beyond their understanding.
"Nothing, anywhere ever, is supposed to be able to do what it is doing."
Even a lesser effort like Village of the Damned benefits
from the eerie establishing shots that open the film.
It sounds like a Carpenter film.
Carpenter has written or co-written the scores
for most of his films, ever since his 1974 feature debut, Dark Star.
Carpenter’s father was a music professor at Western Kentucky University,
where Carpenter did some of his undergrad work.
His spare, unsettling, pulsing, mostly electronic music is
as much a Carpenter signature as any of his visual touches.
Even when the director works with other composers,
like Ennio Morricone for The Thing and Jack Nitzsche for Starman,
they tend to create scores in the Carpenter mold,
relying more on electronic instruments rather than traditional orchestral sounds.
It features fluid, widescreen photography.
Carpenter suffered in the VHS era due to pan-and-scan,
a process that cropped widescreen compositions to fit
the narrower aspect ratio of pre-HD televisions.
And that’s because few directors make such deliberate use
of widescreen images.
Carpenter fills the frame with significant details, whether he’s
capturing a sweeping vista or a claustrophobic interior.
He was an early champion of the Steadicam, and he
unlocked its potential to create unease,
thanks to its unfixed quality and usefulness for long, uninterrupted takes.
In Halloween, the Steadicam makes us feel disturbingly close to the action,
whether Carpenter is using it for the famous, first-person opening scene
or simply following Laurie and her friends home from school.
Later in the film, he pulls back from a pair of eager teens
making out on a couch to slowly introduce a terrifying detail
in another part of the frame.
The macho hero is this close to parody.
A fan of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood,
Carpenter likes to feature tough guy protagonists.
"Life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."
But he also likes to tweak them, usually with the help of Kurt Russell.
"I was born ready."
Russell and Carpenter first teamed up for the hit TV biopic Elvis,
"I wanna be an entertainer.
I wanna sing in a gospel quartet."
And they’ve played around with American icons ever since.
"Call me Snake."
In Escape from New York, Russell’s Snake Plissken
plays like an unsmiling Eastwood hero
going through the latest in a long series of bad days.
"You're a cop."
"I'm an asshole."
He’s almost but not quite a send-up of an action movie hero.
"You gonna kill me now, Snake?"
"I'm too tired.
Maybe later."
Russell played it just as grumpy, but much straighter, in The Thing.
"He ain't tying me up."
"Then I'll have to kill you, Childs."
In Big Trouble in Little China, he pulls out all the stops
as Jack Burton, drawing on his old Elvis performance
and bringing in some notes of John Wayne, to play a truck driver
too dumb to realize he has no idea what he’s doing,
as he’s drawn into a mystery in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
"We may be trapped."
Carpenter wants us to enjoy everything that makes watching no-nonsense,
fight-first-ask-questions-later heroes so fun to watch,
while also reminding us not to take them that seriously.
"Ah, you know what old Jack Burton always says
at a time like this?"
"Who?"
"Jack Burton, me."
With his love of over-the-top machismo, it makes perfect sense
that he would look to the world of professional wrestling
for the star of They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper.
"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass."
It’s a slow burn.
Carpenter’s thrillers increase suspense by increments.
The tension in films like Assault on Precinct 13,
Halloween, and The Thing, builds and builds
as series of disconcerting episodes reveal themselves as real dangers.
"I don't know what the hell's in there, but its weird
and pissed off whatever it is."
A dog showing up at an Antarctic outpost
after inexplicably being hunted from a helicopter
leads to a later scene of the same dog walking down a hallway
just a touch too deliberately,
then one of it watching a helicopter land, and then one of it acting strangely
when placed in a kennel with other dogs.
Finally, only after all these scenes, then does all hell breaks loose.
But when it’s scary, it's really scary.
Almost inevitably, chaos starts to overwhelm
the characters of a Carpenter film.
In In the Mouth of Madness,
Sam Neill plays insurance investigator John Trent,
who’s looking into the disappearance of bestselling horror author Sutter Cane.
Trent fights the idea that he’s trapped in
one of Cane’s stories until he can’t deny it any longer.
"It's Cane's story, and it'll spread with each new reader.
That's how it gets its power."
The concept is especially disturbing in the hands of
a director who’d spent much of his career using horror
as a dark reflection of the real world and is here
letting one slip into the other.
"This is not reality!"
"Reality is not what it used to be."
Adapting Stephen King’s Christine, Carpenter had the challenge
of making a possessed Plymouth Fury.
He made it work.
It relies more on tension than gore.
Halloween beget dozens, maybe hundreds, of imitators
that filled movie screens with blood and guts in the early ‘80s,
but Halloween itself suggests more than it shows.
The violence is explicit but relatively bloodless.
If there’s an overt model, it’s Hitchcock’s Psycho,
terrifying but also carefully orchestrated.
But when it does go for the gore, it goes all out.
Carpenter knew how to use gory imagery as effective punctuation.
For The Thing, he brought in effects master Rob Bottin to
create disturbing, otherworldly images of twisted anatomy.
It has a strong anti-authoritarian bent.
Though born in upstate New York,
Carpenter grew up in the still-segregated south of Kentucky,
disturbed by the stories and opinions of many of his neighbors.
He lived through the counterculture rebellions of the ‘60s,
so it’s little surprise his films express a distrust in authority.
"Freedom, sir."
"In America?
That died a long time ago."
In Escape from New York, soldier-turned-outlaw Snake
only reluctantly agrees to help the U.S. government
save the president and end an ongoing war in order to win his own freedom.
"I don't give a --- about your war, or your president."
And in the end he finds their motivations
too distasteful not to sabotage.
In Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars,
cops find they have to forge alliances with criminals for the greater good.
"You saved my life, twice now."
"Twice?"
"You must be serious about keeping me alive."
Whether it’s the corrupt government of Escape from New York
and Escape from L.A.,
the alien-infested society of They Live
or the local police who can’t get it together
to stop Michael Myers in Halloween,
there’s a pervasive sense in Carpenter’s films
that institutions inevitably let down
those they’re supposed to protect, and it’s up to the heroes to
stand up for themselves and what they believe.
Carpenter is rarely openly political.
He used to annoy liberal friends by wearing a John Wayne pin
out of admiration for Wayne’s artistry, not his politics.
But with They Live he made a remarkable exception.
"The poor and the underclass are growing.
Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent."
In the heart of the Reagan era, he told the allegorical story
of a drifter who discovers glasses that allow him to see the aliens
who have colonized Earth, the subliminal messages they
use to make humans obedient consumers, and the power structure
that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
"The golden rule, he who has the gold makes the rules."
The movie’s message is unmistakable:
Don’t believe what you’re told, especially when those doing
the telling stand to benefit.
"You could have a little taste of that good life too.
Now I know you want it, hell, everybody does."
Even if it’s a departure,
you still know it’s a John Carpenter film.
Carpenter spent much of the ‘80s and ‘90s alternating
between studio projects and lower-budget independent films.
But his work-for-hire efforts rarely play like homework assignments.
They feature the same stylistic craftsmanship and bring in many
of the same themes as the movies he worked on from the beginning.
His love of Hitchcock’s man-on-the-run films is
evident in the science fiction romance Starman,
a gentle, moving effort that suggests he could have had great success
indulging his sentimental side.
"Then tell me you love me."
"I love you."
It ends on a dark note.
Carpenter doesn’t mind leaving viewers unsettled.
Dark Star ends with a character surfing to his death in space,
an echo of Dr. Strangelove.
Michael Myers escapes his apparent death at the end of Halloween.
Carpenter even ended the world a few times in
what’s come to be known as his Apocalypse Trilogy.
The Thing concludes with its characters destined to die
without necessarily having stopped their alien foe from escaping.
"What do we do?"
"Why don't we just wait here for a little while."
At the heart of Carpenter’s films, there’s a distrust of rules and received
wisdom,
and a confidence that even the most orderly place,
be it a scientific lab or a quiet suburb, can descend into chaos.
Like Hawks and Ford, Carpenter likes to present himself as a craftsman.
"Can I as you what, what particular element
about the Western appealed to you?
From the beginning."
"I wouldn't know."
In interviews, he’s reluctant to unpack his films’ themes.
"What I hate worse than anything else is pretension in any form.
Somebody who's pretentious and is delivering a message.
Because I don't think film, motion pictures is at all intellectual,
I think its all feelings."
And on audio commentaries he’s much more open about the how
of his movies than the why of them.
"We used Carbopol, which is the ingredient in Twinkies
that holds it together, that was our slime."
Interpreting, he seems to suggest, is our job,
and if we just want to be scared or entertained,
that’s fine too.
Yet one surefire way to know you’re watching a John Carpenter film
is the nagging sense that there’s much below the surface to unpack.
The scary ones are scary.
The thrilling ones are thrilling.
But they’re never just scary, thrilling movies.
Whether Carpenter’s unsettling a placid small town
or destroying the entire world,
there’s a purposefulness to his films that’s hard to mistake.
A sense that fearfulness can lead to watchfulness.
And those paying attention and not taking anything for granted,
those who don’t accept anything they see at face value,
are the most likely to make it through the night.
"You know its Halloween.
I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare, huh?"
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