John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American filmmaker, composer, and actor. Most commonly associated with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, he is generally recognized as a master of the horror genre. At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild gave him the Golden Coach Award and lauded him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions". On April 3, 2025, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Carpenter's early films included critical and commercial successes such as Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, and Starman. Though he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker, his other productions from the 1970s and the 1980s only later came to be considered cult classics; these include Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, They Live, In the Mouth of Madness, and Escape from L.A.. He returned to the Halloween franchise as a composer and executive producer on Halloween, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends.
Carpenter usually composes or co-composes the music in his films. He won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the soundtrack of Vampires and has released five studio albums: Lost Themes, Lost Themes II, Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, and Lost Themes IV: Noir. He also produces horror, science fiction, and children's comics through Storm King Comics, the publisher founded by his wife, Sandy King, in 2013.
Early life
John Howard Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, on January 16, 1948, the son of Milton Jean and music professor Howard Ralph Carpenter. In 1953, after his father accepted a job at Western Kentucky University, the family relocated to Bowling Green, Kentucky. For much of his childhood, he and his family lived in a log cabin on the university's campus. He was interested in films from an early age, particularly the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as 1950s low-budget horror films such as The Thing from Another World and high-budget sci-fi like Godzilla and Forbidden Planet.Carpenter began making short horror films with an 8 mm camera before he had even started high school. Just before he turned 14 in 1962, he made a few major short films: Godzilla vs. Gorgo, featuring Godzilla and Gorgo via claymation, and the sci-fi western Terror from Space, starring the one-eyed creature from It Came from Outer Space. He graduated from College High School, then enrolled at Western Kentucky University for two years as an English major and History minor. With a desire to study filmmaking, which no university in Kentucky offered at the time, he moved to California upon transferring to the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1968. He would ultimately drop out of school in his final semester in order to make his first feature film.
Career
Early career: 1960s - 1970s
In a beginning film course at USC Cinema during 1969, Carpenter wrote and directed an eight-minute short film, Captain Voyeur. The film was rediscovered in the USC archives in 2011 and proved interesting because it revealed elements that would appear in his later film, Halloween.The next year he collaborated with producer John Longenecker as co-writer, film editor, and music composer for The Resurrection of Broncho Billy, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. The short film was enlarged to 35 mm, sixty prints were made, and the film was released theatrically by Universal Studios for two years in the United States and Canada.
Carpenter's first major film as director, Dark Star, was a science-fiction comedy that he co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon. The film reportedly cost only $60,000 and was difficult to make as both Carpenter and O'Bannon completed the film by multitasking, with Carpenter doing the musical score as well as the writing, producing, and directing, while O'Bannon acted in the film and did the special effects. Carpenter received praise for his ability to make low-budget films.
Carpenter's next film was Assault on Precinct 13, a low-budget thriller influenced by the films of Howard Hawks, particularly Rio Bravo. As with Dark Star, Carpenter was responsible for many aspects of the film's creation. He not only wrote, directed, and scored it, but also edited the film using the pseudonym "John T. Chance". Carpenter has said that he considers Assault on Precinct 13 to have been his first real film because it was the first film that he filmed on a schedule. The film was the first time Carpenter worked with Debra Hill, who would collaborate with Carpenter on some of his most well-known films.
Carpenter assembled a main cast that consisted of experienced but relatively obscure actors. The two main actors were Austin Stoker, who had appeared previously in science fiction, disaster, and blaxploitation films, and Darwin Joston, who had worked primarily for television and had once been Carpenter's next-door neighbor.
The film received a critical reassessment in the United States, where it is now generally regarded as one of the best exploitation films of the 1970s.
Carpenter both wrote and directed the Lauren Hutton thriller Someone's Watching Me!. This television film is the tale of a single, working woman who, soon after arriving in L.A., discovers that she is being stalked.
Eyes of Laura Mars, a 1978 thriller featuring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Irvin Kershner, was adapted from a spec script titled Eyes, written by Carpenter, and would become Carpenter's first major studio film of his career.
Halloween was a commercial success and helped develop the slasher genre. Originally an idea suggested by producer Irwin Yablans, who thought of a film about babysitters being menaced by a stalker, Carpenter took the idea and another suggestion from Yablans that it occur during Halloween and developed a story. Carpenter said of the basic concept: "Halloween night. It has never been the theme in a film. My idea was to do an old haunted house film."
Film director Bob Clark suggested in an interview released in 2005 that Carpenter had asked him for his own ideas for a sequel to his 1974 film Black Christmas that featured an unseen and motiveless killer murdering students in a university sorority house. As also stated in the 2009 documentary Clarkworld, Carpenter directly asked Clark about his thoughts on developing the anonymous slasher in Black Christmas:
The film was written by Carpenter and Debra Hill with Carpenter stating that the music was inspired by both Dario Argento's Suspiria and William Friedkin's The Exorcist.
Carpenter again worked with a relatively small budget, $300,000. The budget was so small the actors provided their own costumes. The film grossed more than $65 million initially, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time.
Carpenter has described Halloween as "true crass exploitation. I decided to make a film I would love to have seen as a kid, full of cheap tricks like a haunted house at a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you". The film has often been cited as an allegory on the virtue of sexual purity and the danger of casual sex, although Carpenter has explained that this was not his intent: "It has been suggested that I was making some kind of moral statement. Believe me, I'm not. In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers."
In addition to the film's critical and commercial success, Carpenter's self-composed "Halloween Theme" became recognizable apart from the film.
In 1979, Carpenter began what was to be the first of several collaborations with actor Kurt Russell when he directed the television film Elvis.
Commercial successes: 1980s
Carpenter followed up the success of Halloween with The Fog, a ghostly revenge tale inspired by horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and by The Crawling Eye, a 1958 film about monsters hiding in clouds.Completing The Fog was an unusually difficult process for Carpenter. After viewing a rough cut of the film, he was dissatisfied with the result. For the only time in his filmmaking career, Carpenter had to devise a way to salvage a nearly finished film that did not meet his standards. In order to make the film more coherent and frightening, Carpenter filmed additional footage that included new scenes.
Despite production problems and mostly negative critical reception, The Fog was another commercial success for Carpenter. The film was made on a budget of $1,000,000, but it grossed over $21,000,000 in the United States alone. Carpenter has said that The Fog is not his favorite film, although he considers it a "minor horror classic".
Carpenter immediately followed The Fog with the science-fiction adventure Escape from New York. Featuring several actors that Carpenter had collaborated with or would collaborate with again, and other actors, it became both commercially successful and critically acclaimed.
His next film, The Thing, has high production values, including innovative special effects by Rob Bottin, special visual effects by matte artist Albert Whitlock, a score by Ennio Morricone and a cast including Russell and respected character actors such as Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Keith David, and Richard Masur. The Thing was distributed by Universal Pictures. Although Carpenter's film used the same source material as the 1951 Howard Hawks film, The Thing from Another World, it is more faithful to the John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?, upon which both films were based. Moreover, unlike the Hawks film, The Thing was part of what Carpenter later called his "Apocalypse Trilogy", a trio of films with bleak endings for the film's characters.
The Thing is a graphic, sinister horror film; in a 1999 interview, Carpenter said audiences rejected it for its nihilistic, depressing viewpoint at a time when the United States was in the midst of a recession. When it opened, it was competing against the critically and commercially successful E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a family-friendly film released two weeks earlier that offered a more optimistic take on alien visitation.
The impact on Carpenter was immediatehe lost the job of directing the 1984 science fiction horror film Firestarter because of The Things poor performance. His previous success had gained him a multiple-film contract at Universal, but the studio opted to buy him out of it instead. He continued making films afterward but lost confidence, and did not openly talk about The Things failure until a 1985 interview with Starlog, where he said, "I was called 'a pornographer of violence'... I had no idea it would be received that way... The Thing was just too strong for that time. I knew it was going to be strong, but I didn't think it would be too strong... I didn't take the public's taste into consideration."
While The Thing was not initially successful, it was able to find new audiences and appreciation on home video, and later on television.
In the years following its release, critics and fans have reevaluated The Thing as a milestone of the horror genre. A prescient review by Peter Nicholls in 1992, called The Thing "a black, memorable film may yet be seen as a classic". It has been called one of the best films directed by Carpenter. John Kenneth Muir called it "Carpenter's most accomplished and underrated directorial effort", and critic Matt Zoller Seitz said it "is one of the greatest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made".Trace Thurman described it as one of the best films ever, and in 2008, Empire magazine selected it as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, at number 289, calling it "a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess and outright, nihilistic terror". It is now considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made.
Carpenter's next film, Christine, was the 1983 adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. The story concerns a high-school nerd named Arnie Cunningham who buys a junked 1958 Plymouth Fury which turns out to have supernatural powers. As Cunningham restores and rebuilds the car, he becomes unnaturally obsessed with it, with deadly consequences. Christine did respectable business upon its release and was received well by critics. He said he directed it because it was the only thing offered to him at the time.
Starman was produced by Michael Douglas; the script was well received by Columbia Pictures, which chose it in preference to the script for E.T. and prompted Steven Spielberg to go to Universal Pictures. Douglas chose Carpenter to be the director because of his reputation as an action director who could also convey strong emotion. Starman was reviewed favorably by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and LA Weekly, and described by Carpenter as a film he envisioned as a romantic comedy similar to It Happened One Night only with a space alien. The film received Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Jeff Bridges' portrayal of Starman and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Musical Score for Jack Nitzsche.
After the commercial disappointment of action–comedy Big Trouble in Little China, Carpenter struggled to secure high-profile film offers and resumed making lower budget films such as Prince of Darkness. Some of these films, including They Live, later developed cult followings, but Carpenter did not regain the same level of mainstream industry attention.