Birthday wishes to one of my favorite directors. John Carpenter got started in the 70s as film
director, screenwriter, producer, editor and composer. Carpenter won an Oscar for his short film The
Resurrection of Bronco Billy and went on from to have one the best runs a movie
director has ever had in the action, sci-fi, and horror genres.
Already having established himself with cult movies Dark
Star and Assault on Precinct 13 Carpenter was approached by some producers
about wanting to do a low budget horror movie.
Carpenter along with his then writing partner, the late Debra Hill, went on
to create one of the best horror movie icons of all time with Michael Myers in
Halloween. The horror classic was a
massive hit becoming at that time the highest grossing independent movie of all
time. All involved went on to great careers but it
was Carpenter’s crafty directing and eerie musical score that made this movie
the classic it is. Many imitators
followed but this was the original that started it all.
Carpenter stayed with horror on his next film The Fog but
then wanted to do some action and made the classic Escape from New York. The studio kept forcing different lead actors
from Charles Bronson to Tommy Lee Jones but Carpenter stayed tough and got Kurt
Russell to get the part. Russell was
still known as the Disney kid and was trying to put that behind him after an
injury derailed his professional baseball career as he was getting back in to
acting. With Escape this started a collaboration
in the actor-director partnership in the likes of Wayne and Ford. Russell and Carpenter went on to do three more
films together including a sequel to the very successful, critically and
financially, Escape from New York.
Carpenter then went horror-sci-fi with his next film in the remake
of The Thing from Another World simply known as The Thing. Again Kurt Russell starred with a great cast of
men in Antarctica that have come in contact with a being from another
planet. This movie bombed at the box
office and critical reception was warm at best.
Since then the movie has claimed cult status and is recognized as one of
the great horror movies of all time along with Halloween putting Carpenter in
some pretty elite company.
Carpenter went on to have a great decade in the 80s with
films like Starman, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and another movie with
Russell, the wildly entertaining Big Trouble in Little China. In the 90s he did the comedy Memoirs of an
Invisible Man, In the Mouth of Madness, Children of the Damned, Vampires, and
the sequel Escape from LA. The 00s
brought Ghost of Mars and some TV work but Carpenter mostly sat and accepted
checks for all the remakes being done on his old movies.
2012 saw the return of Carpenter as he got back behind the
camera for the horror flick The Ward. It garnered mediocre response, had a hard
time finding a distributor and went straight to video. There have been rumors of his next project
but nothing concrete so sit back and wait for what will hopefully be the return
of the great director John Carpenter. I
sure would like to see him do a Western.
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