Simon Thompson looks at the rise of John Carpenter and his peak years throughout the 1970s and 80s…
Director, musician, and Master Roshi look-alike John Howard Carpenter is a living legend. Carpenter’s work has guided scores of creatives from filmmakers, to musicians, to writers, to illustrators and game designers – a legacy of which very few directors can so proudly boast.
Carpenter predominately works in genres which various irritating patrician types see as having no artistic value. Carpenter once succinctly described perception of him by the critical establishment as being, “ In England, I’m a horror movie director. In Germany, I’m a filmmaker. In the US, I’m a bum.” But like Hitchcock and Roger Corman before him, a generation raised on Carpenter’s movies has since re-shaped the critical consensus, culminating in him being awarded a Golden Coach Award at the Cannes Film Festival, specifically lauding him as “a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions”. Frankly I couldn’t have put it any better myself.
John Carpenter was born in 1948 in Carthage, New York to Milton Jean Carpenter a housewife and Howard Ralph Carpenter, a music professor. At the tender age of 5, John relocated from upstate New York to Kentucky due to his father’s work, spending most of his childhood living in a log cabin on the Western Kentucky University campus. Carpenter’s early interest in cinema was sparked by westerns, particularly those of Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as science fiction, with the young Carpenter being especially enamoured of Hawks’ The Thing From Another World as well as Godzilla and Forbidden Planet.
Carpenter sought to emulate his heroes via making films on a super 8 camera, making a Godzilla homage in Claymation, and a science fiction short entitled Terror From Space. Upon graduating from high school, he attended Western Kentucky University for two years majoring in English, but what he truly wanted was to become a filmmaker. Carpenter realised that there was nowhere that would let him achieve his dream in Kentucky, so in 1968 he moved to California, transferring to the USC School of Cinematic Arts in the process.
Just a year later, Carpenter made his first student film, an eight minute short titled Captain Voyeur. The short focuses on a bored office worker who becomes obsessed by a woman at his job to the extent of stalking her on her way home. In retrospect Captain Voyeur represents an early sign of the themes and stylistic traits that would come to define Carpenter in the years to come, such as a mixture of horror and comedy and the nature of obsession (the latter of which resurfacing in Halloween nearly a decade later).
Carpenter’s subsequent early effort The Resurrection of Bronco Billy (1970), a short western which he co-wrote, composed, and edited, proved to be his first taste of prominence. The short, about a young man (Johnny Crawford) living in a modern city but longing to be a cowboy in the wild west, won both an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and received an extensive theatrical release by Universal across the United States and Canada.
Carpenter’s experiences in making short films showed him the importance of a tight story structure and efficiency, lessons which stood him in good stead for his debut feature Dark Star (1974). A science fiction-comedy directed by Carpenter and co-scripted by his friend and fellow USC graduate Dan O’Bannon (the future genius behind Alien and a pioneer of cyberpunk) – Dark Star follows the crew of the eponymous dilapidated spaceship as they complete their task of destroying other planets which threaten the colonisation of the galaxy.
Dark Star began life as a 45 minute 16mm college project budgeted at $6,000 and a crew largely consisting of students, however Carpenter and O’Bannon were able to recruit renowned concept artist Ron Cobb and model designer Greg Jein, whose consultancy on the movie gave it a professional look that ninety nine percent of other small budget studio productions could only dream of.
Through sheer resourcefulness on the part of O’Bannon, Cobb, and Jein the trio overcame the lack of budget by having the aliens the crew encounters be made out of beach balls and to achieve the look of hyperspace O’Bannon tracked the camera while leaving the shutter open to create the illusion that the model ship was travelling faster than the speed of light.
Carpenter and O’Bannon completed their first cut in 1972, but wanting to expand upon the film’s tight 45 minute length the duo quickly realised they would need serious outside investment to turn their project into a feature film. Enter producer/director Jonathan Kaplan, who took such a liking to the forty five minutes the pair had produced that he parted with $10,000, a sum that allowed Carpenter to shoot an additional fifty minutes of footage – bringing the length up to an hour and twenty minutes.
Through O’Bannon’s friendship with John Landis, who brought the film to the attention of producer Jack H. Harris, Dark Star was able to gain a theatrical distribution deal. Unfortunately Harris was an absolutely ruthless producer, demanding almost half an hours’ worth of footage be cut resulting in extensive re-shoots to bring the movie back up to feature length. Harris also demanded that the film obtain a marketable G rating, forcing Carpenter to tone down the bad language and blur a wall covered in nude centrefolds. O’Bannon in particular found the cuts hard to come to terms with, describing the experience as ” [having] had what would have been the world’s most impressive student film and it [becoming] the world’s least impressive professional film”.
At its premiere at Filmex in Los Angeles, Dark Star received a warm reception from the audience in attendance. This did not extend to its theatrical release in January 1975 however, as Carpenter and O’Bannon both reported witnessing nearly empty screenings and no audience reaction whatsoever to the comedy. To exacerbate matters, critical reception proved to be little better, with Variety calling it a” limp parody of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that warrants attention only for some remarkably believable special effects achieved with very little money.”
Roger Ebert on the other hand represented a lone dissenting voice, appreciating the movie’s individual merits, and immediately describing it as being “one of the damnedest science fiction movies I’ve ever seen, a berserk combination of space opera, intelligent bombs, and beach balls from other worlds.” Due to Carpenter’s subsequent popularity and the film’s cult following which developed via its release on home video a decade later, Dark Star has come to be reappraised as a science fiction masterpiece and an ingenious meshing of two completely contrasting genres.
Figures from Doug Naylor (the creator of Red Dwarf), Hideo Kojima, Danny Boyle, and Quentin Tarantino (who called it a ‘masterpiece’) have all cited Dark Star as a personal favourite and formative influence upon their own work, a full circle critical 180 turn, in contrast to the drubbing as disposable low budget sci-fi trash it received during its initial release.
Carpenter’s next project, Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), came at the direct behest of the producer of Dark Star J. Stein Kaplan, who wanted the burgeoning talent to direct a $100,000 exploitation movie, but allowed Carpenter complete creative control over the details. Taking inspiration from the works of Hitchcock and Sergio Leone, as well as Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Carpenter wanted to combine the intense and thrilling violence of an action movie with the intimacy and character dynamics commonly found in the hangout genre (stories usually taking place in one or two locations at most).
Completing the script in just eight days and wrapping shooting in only twenty, Carpenter hired a largely unknown cast including TV actor Darwin Joston (who was also his neighbour at the time), blaxploitation veteran Austin Stoker, and Laurie Zimmer, so as not to stretch his limited budget. Assault On Precinct 13 represented what Carpenter called his “ first professional work”, due to being given Panavision cameras and 35mm film stock to work with.
Assault On Precinct 13, tells the story of a policeman named Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) and a death row bound convict, Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), who are forced through circumstance to defend a defunct, isolated precinct from a violent street gang terrorising Los Angeles.
Shot in a minimalist, almost spartan documentary style and sound tracked by a distinctively menacing synthesiser-heavy score, Assault On Precinct 13 is a masterclass in juggling both action and story. The level of characterisation afforded to Stoker and Johnston’s characters as well as the street gang antagonists, (the infamous ice cream van scene alone still being shocking all these years later) that demonstrates that the film is multiple cuts above being a cheap and nasty exploitation thriller made on a quick turnaround.
Released in the United States in 1976 to a muted critical and audience reception, it wasn’t until it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival a year later that the movie would start to gain any positive critical feedback. George A. Romero, whose own work Martin was also appearing in the competition, recalled being floored by Carpenter’s film, but it was the premiere of Assault On Precinct 13 in Britain, however where Carpenter experienced his first taste of critical adulation.
The head of the London Film Festival, Ken Wlaschin, praised the movie as being :“one of the most powerful and exciting crime thrillers from a new director in a long time. It grabs hold of the audience and simply doesn’t let go as it builds to a crescendo of irrational violence that reflects only too well our fears of unmotivated attack… It is a frightening look at the crumbling of rational ideas of law and order under an irresistible attack by the forces of irrationality and death.” When it was first screened at the festival, Derek Malcom, a film critic writing for The Guardian, called the unanimous applause “deafening”.
Due to its success in Britain Assault on Precinct 13 was picked up by various other distributors across Europe, with by and large more cine-literate European audiences immediately understanding Carpenter’s attempt to reorientate Rio Bravo and other Hawks westerns in the same vein such as Rio Lobo (1970) into an urban setting. Like Dark Star, before it Assault On Precinct 13 grew a rabid cult following in the decades which followed, with contemporary audiences seeing it as an action movie classic that fully displays Carpenter’s skillset as a writer, director, musician, and editor.
With two midnight movie favourites under his belt, Carpenter was quietly establishing himself as a Samuel Fuller for the 1970s, fully capable of taking bare bones ideas for genre movies and transforming them into fully fleshed out intelligent work. Independent producer Irwin Yablans was cannily aware of this and sought Carpenter to direct a film about a psychotic killer who stalks suburban babysitters, but little did Yablans know just how much he would shape the horror genre.
Carpenter accepted Yablans’s offer for just a $10,000 director’s fee under the condition of complete creative freedom, and immediately began with his writing partner/girlfriend Debra Hill on a script titled Halloween (1978). The basic concept behind Carpenter’s vision was that Halloween night wasn’t something that had been largely explored in horror cinema before, with Carpenter wanting specifically “ to do an old haunted house film” in the vein of House of Wax (1953) but with a darker, grittier, and more explicit modern edge.
Carpenter and Hill completed the first draft of Halloween in just ten days, but due to conflict with Yablans who wanted the movie to be formatted as a radio serial with regular boos, after persuading Yablans that this was a bad idea Carpenter and Hill’s final draft for Halloween was finished within three weeks.
Set in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, Halloween follows an escaped serial killer named Michael Myers (Nick Castle) who returns back to his hometown after fifteen years of institutionalisation in a mental hospital due to him murdering his sister in childhood. With fifteen years’ worth of evil to burn off, Myers goes on a one man killing spree stalking a teenaged babysitter named Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends, while a psychiatrist by the name of Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance) tries to re-capture him.
Drawing on the Celtic origins of Halloween as a festival (specifically the festival of Samhain and its surrounding myths of evil souls being resurrected to haunt the living), Carpenter and Hill’s reinterpreted the notion of unkillable evil derived from the myths of Samhain to construct the character of Michael Myers.
In the creation of Michael Myers Carpenter also drew upon personal experience, using a visit he had to a psychiatric ward when he was still in college when he was shown round the wing where the most seriously mentally ill patients were housed. One in particular, a teenage boy who looked at Carpenter with what he described as a “blank stare”, gave him the inspiration for the character’s complete lack of humanity.
With a budget of roughly $325,000, Carpenter couldn’t afford any big name stars but as with Assault On Precinct 13 before it, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. To play Michael Myers Carpenter simply hired his old college friend Nick Castle. After June Lockhart turned down the part of protagonist Laurie Strode, Carpenter gambled on a little known 19 year old TV actress, Jamie Lee Curtis. Carpenter specifically cast Curtis because of her mother Janet Leigh (of Psycho fame), believing that the family connection between the two would enhance the marketing of Halloween. For the part of Dr Loomis, the erudite psychiatrist doggedly pursuing Michael Myers, Carpenter wanted Hammer legend Peter Cushing, whose career was on the rise again thanks to his part as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977). Due to the low salary, Cushing’s agent turned down the part.
After being rebuffed by another Hammer legend in the shape of Christopher Lee (who would later describe this decision as the worst of his entire career), Carpenter was able to secure the services of veteran British actor Donald Pleasance. Pleasance’s daughter Lucy, a musician, was a fan of Carpenter’s score for Assault On Precinct 13 and convinced her father to star.
Filming on a tight four week schedule, Carpenter and the crew realised they had to use every trick in the book due to their limited time and finances. For Michael Myer’s iconic mask, they simply purchased a two dollar Captain Kirk Star Trek mask from Hollywood Boulevard, widening the eye slits and spray painting it a ghostly shade of white. Shooting almost entirely on location in Pasadena, Carpenter heavily relied on a new camera named Panglide, essentially a cheaper version of Steadicam, which allowed Carpenter and the crew to manoeuvre efficiently around the suburban houses that made up most of the sets.
Although the story takes place in Autumn, as the title suggests, ironically the shoot was done during spring, so as a direct result the crew were constantly forced to reuse artificial leaves for many of the exterior shots and struggled to find pumpkins to place outside.
Released in 1978, Halloween proved to be Carpenter’s first resounding commercial success grossing $70,000,000 despite having very little marketing, and relying almost exclusively on word of mouth praise. While the critical establishment such as Pauline Kael, dismissed it as a cheap exploitation movie, dissenting voices such as Gene Siskel, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert all praised the film with Ebert giving it a spot on his top 10 films of 1978 list.
Carpenter’s intimate camera angles, Hitchcockian exploration of voyeurism, and his score, a repetitive yet haunting piano melody influenced an entire sub-genre of horror films that would come to be known as slasher movies, where a hulking (usually silent) killer murders a gaggle of teenagers that make the same four or five mistakes every time. Overall, Halloween created the standard for serial killer movies that in the decades to come would spawn legions of imitators which for the most part paled in comparison to the original, not to mention launched a franchise of its own which Carpenter has served as a producer on.
In 1980, Carpenter followed Halloween with a ghost story movie titled The Fog. Set in a small coastal town in Northern California, where, during a celebration of its centenary, a mysterious supernatural cloud begins to envelop the town, bringing about disastrous consequences stemming from a shipwreck over a century earlier.
Stimulated by a combination of a visit to Stonehenge during the European promotion tour for Assault On Precinct 13, Carpenter’s childhood love of EC horror comics, and the British horror film The Trollenberg Terror (retitled The Crawling Eye for the American release) The Fog is a brooding and atmospheric piece of horror which takes a simple idea ( in this case a ghost ship) and gets the absolute maximum out of it.
Unfortunately for Carpenter, the production process was not a happy one. After viewing an initial rough cut of the movie, Carpenter quickly realised that what he had seen was nowhere near his usual exacting standards. Because of this he realised extensive re-shoots for additional scenes and a longer editing process were needed to produce a final film which made complete narrative sense.
Carpenter and writing partner Debra Hill also realised that The Fog’s horror was disappointingly tame, so used the extensive post-production to add more gore to give it a leg up in competing with other films in the same genre that were pushing the limits of what was acceptable at the time. The reshoots increased the budget from $900,000 to $1.1 million, but luckily for Carpenter, who found the making of The Fog to be the most draining of his career up until that point, the movie made $21,000,000 at the US box office in spite of a divided critical reception.
If The Fog represented a difficult production that Carpenter found a chore, then his subsequent movie Escape From New York (1981) was an arduous shoot that resulted in one of his proudest professional achievements. Carpenter first conceived the idea for Escape From New York, in the mid-1970s as a direct response to the Watergate Scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation as a result thereof. In Carpenters’ eyes, “The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president.”
Set in the far off dystopian future 1997 (where the United States is a crime ridden hellhole and New York City has become an open air prison island), Escape From New York tells the story of a former special forces agent and current federal prisoner named Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), who is put in the position of rescuing the American President (Donald Pleasance) from New York after an Air Force One crash. If Plissken, is successful he will be granted his freedom, but the catch is he has only 24 hours to find the president in a sprawling metropolis filled with hostile forces.
Carpenter, throughout the mid-late 1970s, tried to find a potentially interested party for the script but to no avail, as he believed the narrative to be “ too violent, too scary, [and] too weird” (with its depiction of New York in chaos being taken from Death Proof and Carpenter’s desire to add a science fiction component to it) for the vast majority of producers and studios.
Eventually he found an interested studio in the shape of AVCO Embassy Pictures who gave him a $6,000,000 budget to work with. To realise a massive decaying metropolis on a shoestring was no easy task, leading to location manager Barry Bernardi suggesting East St Louis which had become massively dilapidated due to a fire four and half years earlier. With an exterior location secured, Carpenter utilised various sound stages to shoot the film’s interior scenes.
The casting of the lead, Snake Plissken, proved to be a point of contention between Carpenter and AVCO. AVCO wanted a star name such as Charles Bronson, Tommy Lee Jones, or Chuck Norris in the part (Bronson being specifically vetoed by Carpenter on the grounds of his age), but Carpenter wanted Kurt Russell who at this point was best known as child-teen star in various hacky Disney comedies – a far cry from anybody’s vision of a hardboiled ex Special Forces agent.
Having worked with Russell on an Elvis TV movie two years previously, Carpenter realised he was perfect for the role and went against AVCO’s wishes to secure his involvement.
Released to stellar box office, grossing $50 million from its $6 million budget, and largely positive critical reception, particularly towards its action and economical storytelling, Escape From New York proved to be a true high for a director who was only seven years into being a professional.
Alongside the likes of Blade Runner, Mad Max, Akira, and Jeremiah, Escape From New York is a beautiful blend of both science fiction and action. The fight scenes and noir style element, particularly in the character of Snake Plissken, a combo of Bruce Lee, Phillip Marlowe, and Harry Callaghan played to perfection with a sardonic wit by Kurt Russell, are still a joy to watch decades later.
You only need to look at the wide variety of what Escape From New York has shaped in its wake, from the works of novelist William Gibson to Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid games, to see how much of a cultural touchstone the film truly is.
Carpenter, at this point, had made four stone cold classics in a row, so the only logical thing was to add yet another one to his rapidly growing cv of certified masterpieces, 1982’s The Thing. Set in a remote Antarctic research base, The Thing follows a group of American researchers trapped in a ferocious blizzard led by helicopter pilot R.J MacReady (Kurt Russell) who come across a ferocious alien life form that can transform itself into anybody or anything. Through a combination of the sheer danger of their enemy’s ability and their complete isolation due to their location and communications being cut off, the research team are gripped by an understandable paranoia and mistrust.
A remake of Howard Hawks’s 1951 film The Thing From Another World, The Thing had been a project gestating in development since the mid-1970s. Carpenter was first approached as a possible director in about 1976, but due to his status as an independent filmmaker at that point, Universal instead decided to approach Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hopper, whose profile was much higher at the time. After attempts to realise The Thing with both Tobe Hopper and Ridley Scott fell through, the opportunity to direct bounced back Carpenter’s way.
Although Carpenter thought that Hawks’ adaptation of the John W. Campbell novel The Thing From Another World would be difficult to surpass, he decided that his version would be more faithful to the original story, and that the eponymous creature’s transformation abilities could frighten a new generation of moviegoers thanks to rapid advancements in special effects.
With a budget set at an initial $10,000,000 ($33 million in 2025) this rapidly skyrocketed due to a 98 day filming schedule, an extra $200,000 allotted for creature effects, and an additional $17,000,000 for marketing costs, the film’s finances ballooned to the extent it needed a miracle at the box office to make its money back.
The shoot for The Thing was a brutal one for Carpenter and his crew. Shot on location in the Arctic circle itself, the cold, long hours, and the extensive special effects resulted in complete psychological and physical burnout for everyone involved. The shoot was so tough that effects coordinator Rob Bottin developed a bleeding ulcer and double pneumonia, due to the work load/stress that came with managing a crew of more than thirty people and the extreme cold.
Once filming wrapped and The Thing was finally released in 1982, it received the worst possible combination of critical and commercial disappointment imaginable. Critics accused it of being too cold and sterile, as well criticising its special effects for being too excessive despite praising them for their technical ingenuity.
At the box office, The Thing was up against the hopeful optimism of Spielberg’s E.T., Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Mad Max II, Conan the Barbarian, Tron, and Poltergeist, whose far less restrictive PG rating gave it a leg up in its takings. The Thing is a brooding, cynical story centred around an atmosphere of mistrust in keeping with both the original short story but also the inspiration Carpenter drew from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, whose style of cosmic horror traffics in the human fear of the unknown.
Because The Thing was released during a period where the United States was still gripped in a recession, and audiences were looking to more optimistic stories, it was practically dead on arrival due to this drastic taste change but also a limited marketing campaign, which didn’t sell cinemagoers on the movie’s finer points.
Like Dark Star before it, time has been nothing but kind to The Thing as the cult audience that it did reach have grown up to become directors themselves. The dark storytelling, themes of mistrust, and beautifully executed special effects, are now sighted as positives by subsequent generations of its devotees from Guillermo del Toro to Quentin Tarantino to Edgar Wright who have adapted various themes and ideas from it into their own works.
Despite The Thing’s considerable virtues Carpenter had now unfairly acquired the sobriquet of being the director of a turkey (The Thing grossed $15.6 million from a roughly $19.6 million budget). At this point Carpenter realised that he needed a steady hit to reorientate his career and show that he could be trusted by a big studio again. This is, why he so eagerly took on the chance to direct Christine (1983) an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. King, by this point, was a well established and beloved author who was writing horror tour de forces with monotonous regularity. Because of this, King adaptations were proving to be box office winners providing Carpenter with the perfect blueprint to regain his reputation as a hitmaker.
Ironically losing his job as a director on another bigger budgeted King adaptation Firestarter (1984) due to the poor box office showing of The Thing, Christine (1983) is a simple does-what-it-says-on-the-tin piece of b-movie fun. The plot follows Arnie (Keith Gordon) an outcast 17-year-old high school senior who becomes obsessed with the restoration of a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Little does Arnie know however, that the car is possessed by a monstrous entity that seeks to mow down everything and everybody in its path.
Filmed on a quick schedule to capitalise on the Stephen King mania that was gripping Hollywood, Christine is a snappy, no nonsense piece of horror cinema with excellent characterisation, especially when it comes to Arnie’s descent into destructive obsession over his prized car. Released in December 1983 and taking $21,000,000 from a $10 million budget, Christine rapidly resurrected Carpenter’s reputation as an efficient and reliable director amongst Hollywood’s various moneymen.
A year later, in 1984, Carpenter branched out into the unfamiliar territory of romance, albeit with a science fiction element, with his follow up to Christine, Starman. Written by the duo of Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, Starman was a script given to Carpenter after it had been in five years of development hell at Columbia Studios. Broadly a romantic story, Starman centres around the relationship between a lonely widow named Jenny (Karen Allen) and an extraterrestrial being in a cloned human body (Jeff Bridges) nicknamed Starman. Starman has ended up on earth because of an invitation on a gold phonograph record he found in the Voyager 2 space probe. After falling in love the pair are forced on the run by the United States Government who want to capture Starman for themselves.
A combination of road films and romantic comedies such as It Happened One Night, The Defiant Ones, and The 39 Steps (stories which all involved a cross country trek with two polar opposite leads), Starman is a funny yet melancholic and extremely romantic story, that Carpenter badly wanted to tell to shed his image of being simply just an exploitation and genre film director.
The majority of critics praised Starman specifically for Carpenter’s direction, Bridges and Allen’s performances in the leads, and the groundbreaking special effects, but the film unfortunately failed to catch on at the box office grossing only $28.7 million off a $24,000,000 budget. More likely than not this was down to audiences expecting another Halloween or Escape From New York, only to be bitterly dissatisfied when presented with the exact opposite.
With the benefit of hindsight, Starman is a movie which shows just how truly versatile a director Carpenter is. There’s just enough of his trademark suspense and uneasy atmosphere, yet he sincerely embraces the romantic elements of the narrative, just as his idol Howard Hawks once did before him.
By the mid-1980s Carpenter had shown Hollywood at large, that he could direct profitable work on a strict turnaround. As a reward, he was gifted an opportunity to work on a movie that he was unquestionably passionate about, Big Trouble In Little China (1986). Written by the duo of Gary Goldman and David Z Weinstein, Big Trouble In Little China was originally a western set in the 1880s. Carpenter, a lover of Hong Kong cinema, had long harboured a desire to make a martial arts movie, and saw Big Trouble In Little China as the perfect project to realise that ambition.
Because Carpenter wanted the story to take place in a modern setting, Goldman and Weinstein’s script was reworked by script doctor W.D. Richter, who reworked the story’s tone and plot into the version which made it to the screen. The plot of Big Trouble In Little China chronicles the exploits of trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), a bumbling screw up with a heart of gold. Jack finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place when bandits kidnap the fiancé of his friend Wang (Dennis Dun), because of her green eyes. This is the catalyst for Jack and Wang to venture deeper into Chinatown’s underworld where the very same bandits who turn out to be underlings to an evil mystical martial artist named Lo Pan (James Hong), proceed to steal Jack’s pride and joy, his truck.
Filming was severely rushed by production company 20th Century Fox, who badly wanted to compete with the Eddie Murphy starring vehicle The Golden Child which covered similar thematic ground. Fox, fearing that Murphy’s star power would vault The Golden Child over Big Trouble In Little China at the box office, forced Carpenter to start filming in October 1985 so that they were able to release it in July 1986, beating the distribution of The Golden Child by five months.
A combination of both martial arts adventure (in the tradition of Five Fingers of Death and Zu Warriors From Magic Mountain) and screwball comedy, Big Trouble In Little China is a tongue in cheek ridiculously enjoyable hybrid that combines the best qualities of its two genres. Kurt Russell’s brash John Wayne infused performance as the protagonist Jack Burton, is a masterclass in comedic protagonist writing whose influence can be traced to the multitude of similar characters that have cropped up in pop culture since the film’s release from Captain Jack Sparrow to Kenny Powers.
The script’s winning mixture of knowing self-awareness, underscored by a genuine sense of sincerity at the same time, went miles over critics and audiences’ heads during its release in 1986. To put it simply neither party really got what Carpenter was going for with Big Trouble In Little China, but as a running theme in Carpenter’s career in the years since, the movie has developed a sizeable and devoted cult following, and has enjoyed subsequent expressions of retroactive critical praise in large part due to the people who understood its humour at the time growing up and becoming film critics themselves.
Budgeted between $19-25 million and only grossing $11.1 million, Big Trouble In Little China was a financial disaster for Fox. Carpenter had reacquired the director of a turkey label that he had initially gained from the financial failure of The Thing, a full circle turn back into being a pariah. Carpenter was now suffering from a lack of funding, and limited interest from the big studios but being the prolific survivor that he is he followed Big Trouble In Little China with two movies back to back, Prince of Darkness (1987) and They Live (1988).
Tonally, Prince of Darkness was a return to the tone of Carpenter’s early work such as Halloween. It is the story of a priest (Donald Pleasance), who finds a strange vial that turns out to contain the very essence of Satan himself. Drawn from Carpenter’s adoration of the Quatermass series, Carpenter sought to mesh both science fiction and horror together in the same vein.
Shot in thirty days, for just $3 million, Prince of Darkness represented a return to Carpenter’s exploitation era roots in keeping with his regained outsider status. The bulk of critics at the time loathed Prince of Darkness, for whatever reason, with Richard Harrington’s review in the Washington Post containing the most venom; “At one point Pleasence vows that ‘it’s a secret that can no longer be kept.’ Here’s another: ‘The Prince of Darkness stinks.’ It too deserves to be shut up in a canister for 7 million years”.
British film critic Nigel Floyd, writing in Time Out, was far kinder describing it as both “engrossing” and praised the cinematography’s “… claustrophobic terror generated by fluid camerawork and striking angles.”
While Prince of Darkness is nowhere near Halloween or The Thing, or Big Trouble In Little China, it’s still a fun and original take on the idea of the devil, filled to the brim with unforgettable surreal imagery with a killer soundtrack to boot. Overall it didn’t deserve anything close to the vitriol it received, and stands as an overlooked gem in Carpenter’s career.
Carpenter’s final film of the 1980s, They Live (1988), is a microcosm of his artistry. Adapted from a short story by Ray Nelson titled Eight O’clock In The Morning, They Live is a deft blend of horror, science fiction, and keen eyed social satire, born out of Carpenter’s frustration with the direction that America had turned in over the course of the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
They Live is the story of Nada (Roddy Piper), a homeless drifter who comes into contact with a mysterious pair of sunglasses. When Nada tries the glasses on, he finds that they reveal the true horrific reality that a ruling class of alien lifeforms are hiding their true identities, and in secret, they are manipulating the Earth’s mass media and communications into keeping the population under their control. Nada vows to break the aliens’ control over humanity and free the population from their subliminal stranglehold.
During the writing of They Live, Carpenter drew inspiration from his frustration at both the economic policies of Ronald Reagan’s government and what he correctly perceived to be the increased commercialisation of both politics and mass media. Particularly inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and what Carpenter called his ability to present a hidden world, They Live is a biting and depressingly relevant work of satire that pulls no punches in its attack on 1980s American society.
Through the casting of Roddy Piper, a professional wrester who had only had a handful of acting credits before being cast as Nada, They Live maintains a playful and irreverent tone which helps to sugar the pill of how pessimistic and dour its message actually is. This proved to be the movie’s downfall however, as audiences at the time by and large weren’t willing to engage with its stridently critical tone reflected in its box office takings of just $13.4 million dollars.
Over time as the world has become an increasingly scary and dystopian place to live, They Live has gained more and more popularity in the decades that have followed, its dialogue (including the famous line “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble-gum”) and associated imagery have been parodied and paid homage to countless times across the arenas of music, film, streetwear, TV, and video games. Through the advent of social media and the 24 hour news cycle, Carpenter’s satire of the past has come to be seen as a prescient vision of where we have ended up.
The 1990s were not kind to Carpenter at all. Short of his Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness (1994), his films from this period Memories of an Invisible Man (1992), Village of the Damned (1995), Escape From L.A. (1996), and Vampires (1998) are all seen as lesser works by fans and critics alike for a variety of reasons which could be another article unto itself.
Since the 1990s, Carpenter has directed just two films, Ghosts of Mars (2001) and The Ward (2010). Dabbling in his other passions, namely, music and video games, Carpenter has reached a level of personal and professional contentment that filmmakers can spend entire careers searching for. As cultural snobbery around horror and science fiction has gradually faded, Carpenter has been recognised as a truly brilliant filmmaker and storyteller, with a magnificent body of work to match.
Simon Thompson
