TapeHead Profiles John Carpenter

Probably the only Kentucky-born son-of-a-musician to win an Academy Award as a USC film student and redefine an entire film genre at the age of 29, the versatile and unpretentious John Carpenter is one of our favorite auteurs because he's unapologetically embraced the fantasy genre as writer-director-composer of some of modern cinema's most indelible flights of imagination, action, and terror.

While David Cronenberg fancies himself more William Burroughs than William Lustig, and Wes Craven endlessly whines over his desire to make dramas about violin proteges (even as he rakes in big bucks making sequels), Carpenter has never forgotten seeing It Came From Outer Space as a boy and becoming enchanted to the possibilities of science fiction and horror filmmaking. "When that meteorite blew up right in my face", Carpenter has confessed, "that got me sold on films of the fantastic. I knew then that this is what I had to do."

While early press often compared his style to that of Hitchcock's , Carpenter in fact modeled his early career on that of American studio system stylist Howard Hawks. While he's somewhat lamented his failure to achieve his dream to make Westerns and musicals as Hawks did, Carpenter has demonstrated a remarkable ability to craft visually stunning entertainments within the science fiction and horror genres while infusing them with a distinctive personal vision. "I seem to be attracted to stories in which people are trapped in one way or another", he's decided, "But I don't think about it too much". Rarely one to follow commercial instincts, Carpenter has realized many of his best works through a desire to not repeat himself and often sheer off-the-cuff invention when faced with low budgets and limited resources. His phenomenal success with 1978's Halloween, was born when the then-starving director simply needed a job and was offered a concept called The Babysitter Murders and the tiny sum of $300,000 to produce an exploitation quickie. Carpenter banged out a script in 10 days with Debra Hill, hired the unknown daughter of Janet Leigh for the lead, and spent virtually all of the money on the expensive Steadicam process. The film went on to be compared to Psycho, was favorably reviewed in Time and The Village Voice, and grossed 150 times its production cost.

Halloween also spawned an entire flood of rip-offs labeled "slasher" films by Siskel and Ebert, and the stigma of that unfortunate trend has stuck to Carpenter like dirty clothes to this day. "In Europe, I'm an auteur. In Britain, I'm a filmmaker. In America, I'm a bum", Carpenter has accepted. Almost all of his follow-ups, from his vastly underrated 1980 ghost story The Fog, to the 1987 quantum-physics-inspired apocalypse fable Prince Of Darkness, to the 1995 Lovecraft pastiche In The Mouth Of Madness, have been predictably lambasted by critics for not being "the next Halloween."

Still, while Carpenter's gotten little respect as an artist on his native shores, audiences have largely thrilled to his body of work with an enthusiasm that has occasionally awarded him major commercial success and an escape from "cult" status ("They think I'm the next Bert I. Gordon!", he's feared). His 1985 science fiction romance Starman impressed the AMPAS enough to award Jeff Bridges an Oscar nomination. Regrettably, Carpenter's personal favorite films like Prince Of Darkness, his one explicitly political treatise They Live (1988), and especially 1983's remake The Thing failed to find audiences or accolades their first time around. The Thing, however, is currently under major re-evaluation in many camps and may prove yet to be the one Carpenter film that lives on to eclipse Halloween and remain the director's signature classic.

"I grew up watching Hollywood films, and I dearly love them, even when they're bad, I love them", Carpenter has waxed nostalgically. The same thing can be said of Carpenter's own films produced under the Hollywood banner. The Stephen King adaptation Christine (1983), the Chevy Chase action comedy Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (1992), the very literal remake of Village Of The Damned (1995), and the big budget sequel Escape From LA (1996) all failed to achieve the artistic breakthroughs of early works like "Assault On Precinct 13" (1976) or Escape From New York (1981), but even for "sell outs", they contained more than their fair share of ambitious concepts and breathtaking visuals. To paraphrase Quentin Tarantino on Brian DePalma, when Carpenter's films are failures, they're still failures in "interesting ways".

Armed with an iconoclastic vision, his trademarked immaculate widescreen compositions, and pulse-pounding self-penned score, Carpenter is back onscreen this season with the horror-action hybrid Vampires. While his films based on the material of others often prove to be his lesser achievements (The Thing and Starman excepted), Carpenter has rewritten the screenplay and fashioned it to his cynical, but still optimistic, world view. In Carpenter's world, evil is not unstoppable, but a good-hearted man can survive the night and escape with some honor intact. After 35 years in Hollywood, Carpenter should know his well.

- Maxx Renn