“Look, I’m just a broken-down horror director trying to get along in this world, O.K.?” John Carpenter tells brofromanother, in a new interview. “That’s all I’m trying to do, navigate the shoals.”
this past July, at a fan who’d suggested that he might already be the best horror director of all time. “I love your enthusiasm,” Peele added, but “I will just not tolerate any John Carpenter slander!!!” The case for Carpenter as the greatest living American genre filmmaker has certainly been made, whether or not Carpenter himself wants to hear it.
I love the opening of “In the Mouth of Madness,” with all those novels being churned out by printing presses. Was the idea to make something about the way horror comes off an assembly line? One observation that’s been made about your movies is that, like in Lovecraft, evil is something monstrous that characters are forced to confront face to face, instead of it coming from inside them. There are all these moments when the people onscreen simply can’t believe what they’re looking at, or how to deal with it.
Those opening images of a helicopter chasing a dog across the ice are so strange and mysterious. Where did it come from? Well, I studied him in film school, and got to see him in person. He came down to talk at the school. I fell in love with his work because he’s so versatile. He did adventures and “The Thing from Another World,” he did cowboy movies, comedies. I mean, he did all sorts of things. I studied the plumbing: how Hawks made movies, how he staged scenes. I was a fan of that. But other than that I loved the strong women he had. I’ve always been attracted to that.
Well, yeah, I appreciate what he wrote. That’s what people do when they get on a bandwagon. When “Halloween” finally became the critics’ darling, I was “the next Hitchcock”—but only until “The Fog” came out. Then I wasn’t. And, you know, then they start calling you bad names. Many critics don’t like genre films, or at least cheap, low-budget movies. It goes on and on, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the movies. So after a while I just sort of ignore a lot of it.
I don’t look at things like I pulled something off. I don’t see it that way. I love everything I did. I love all the movies that I made, but I also love stopping and relaxing, too—watching basketball, for instance, or playing video games. I’m pretty good after all the years I’ve played. But with that one I was terrible. The controls weren’t intuitive, at least for me. But I guess everybody else had a good time. It was a popular game.
Is it easier to talk to fans about your movies than to feel like you’re on the record, or speaking for posterity? When you say your movies speak for themselves, do you think that some of them speak more directly than others? “They Live” and “In the Mouth of Madness” seem calibrated more politically or sociologically than some of your other work.
That was the big change in wrestling in the nineties, right? They blurred the lines, and Vince McMahon turned himself into an onscreen character. When you were writing the score for “Halloween,” were you thinking about how the score functions in terms of Michael Myers’s role in the film? It’s a bit like the shark in “Jaws”: the music accompanies his presence.
You don’t necessarily use wide-screen for big, vast landscapes or scale. You use it for urban environments, and in a lot of very small and intimate settings. Do you ever have to pull back from offering David Gordon Green input on those new “Halloween” movies?You’ve been very up-front in the past about sequels and intellectual property, and how you can always go back to material if there’s a chance it’ll make more money. Some people can be precious about it, but you’re very direct. There’s always a sequel to be made. There’s always a remake.The rhetoric around “Halloween Ends” is that it’s definitely, finally going to be the last one.
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