john carpenter

Born in Carthage, New York, on January 16, 1948, John Howard Carpenter is the son of a bookseller and a violinist and music teacher who hoped he would follow in his footsteps. But he, although he learned to play various instruments, was already a true movie fan since his father took him to see The African Queen and They Came From Space (He came from beyond) when he was very little . Like Mozart of the Seventh Art, at the age of 14 he had shot four terrifying short films in 8 mm, whose titles are quite a declaration of intent: Revenge of the Colossal Beast , Gorgo vs. Godzilla , Terror from Space , and Sorcerers from Outer Space. At 15 he already had a production company (Emerald), and at 17 he published his own fanzine, “Fantastic Films Illustrated”. His unhealthy passion for the Seventh Art had turned him into a lonely boy who didn’t fit in anywhere.

Thus, it is not surprising that at the age of 22 he already won the Oscar, for best short, for The Resurrection of Bronco Billy , a heartfelt tribute to the western. At that time he had begun studying film at the University of Southern California (USC), where he had occasional professors such as Alfred Hitchcock , John Ford and Orson Welles . However, he left his studies unfinished when he started filming Dark Star . Carpenter co-wrote the script with Dan O’Bannon, who also played a role and helped him compose the soundtrack and elaborate the special effects. It was a small science fiction story, conceived with humor, where some astronauts must fly an unstable planet, but the intelligent bomb they are going to use begins to wonder about the meaning of life. It cost $60,000 but was distributed throughout the US and internationally, dazzling Hollywood executives.

A stalwart admirer of Howard Hawks , the filmmaker who has most influenced his work, Carpenter wrote and directed the B-movie Assault on the 13th Precinct Police Station , an updated version of Río Bravo . Some gang members try to break into a police station to avenge one of their own. It was more successful in Europe than in the United States, where despite everything over the years it has become a cult film. The director was in charge of the soundtrack and also the editing, with the pseudonym John T. Chance, the name of the John Wayne character in the film that inspired him.

He then filmed Someone’s Watching Me! , suspense TV movie indebted to Hitchcock cinema. During filming he fell in love with one of the actresses, Adrienne Barbeau , with whom he immediately married, in 1978. They had a son, John Cody.

After meeting the screenwriter Debra Hill , who would become a regular and essential collaborator, together they wrote the horror film Halloween Night , where a psychopath escapes from a psychiatric hospital and chases a group of friends. Filled with effective suspense sequences, it marked the big screen debut of Jamie Lee Curtis , who had previously shot a television episode.

Against all odds, although it cost just $320,000, it grossed a whopping $65 million worldwide. Carpenter’s score became his best-known musical work. The negative effect is that imitations rained down on her, of irregular quality, since she is considered the initiator of the ‘slasher’ subgenre, marked by psychopaths who persecute groups of young people. It had seven uneven sequels, and even a remake that has also had a sequel.

For Elvis , a telefilm about the life of the King of Rock’n’roll, Carpenter decided to give the main role to Kurt Russell , who after being a youthful star for Walt Disney was going through low hours. However, the success of this production revitalized his career.

Again with Debra Hill as co-writer, he writes The Fog (1980) , in which ghostly silhouettes haunt a coastal town. She brought back Jamie Lee Curtis , who was appearing on-screen with his mother, Janet Leigh , and also gave another key role to Adrienne Barbeau , his wife. After finishing the shooting, he was not happy with the final result, so he decided to write and shoot new sequences. And although it had bad reviews, the box office results were excellent.

Divorced from Barbeau in 1984, John Carpenter fell in love with Sandy King, who had been his script, a profession he also practiced in titles such as Rebels , by Francis Ford Coppola .

Russell had made such a good impression on him that he recruited him again, casting him as Snake Plissen, a comic book hero, in 1997: New York City Rescue , an imaginative blend of science fiction, western, and action film. Many years later, they would shoot together 2013: Rescue in LA , the sequel.

Russell also starred under his orders in The Thing , an imaginative remake of the horror classic The Enigma from Another World , co – directed at the time by his beloved Howard Hawks . A harrowing account of the efforts of a team of researchers in Antarctica to survive attacks by an alien creature capable of shapeshifting, it shows the influence of Alien, the eighth passenger , who he had devastated at the time. It is possibly the best work of the director, who once had a large budget, 15 million dollars. However, it did not make them profitable at the box office, marking the beginning of the director’s decline.

After the slap, he was forced to shoot Christine , an adaptation of Stephen King ‘s novel about a young man who buys an old car that turns out to be an evil entity. Carpenter himself acknowledges that he was not very interested in the project, but that at that time they did not offer him anything else. He tried to reach the general public with Starman , a good alien that emerged in the wake of success two years before ET, the extraterrestrial , but adding a lot of romantic charge. Jeff Bridges – who won an Oscar nomination for this work – plays an alien who takes the form of the deceased husband of a woman who ends up helping him when he is being pursued by government agents.

At that time in his career, Carpenter wanted to show the public that he was capable of changing genres, and he showed great interest in directing Santa Claus , a family film by producer Ilya Salkind, with which there was no final understanding due to his multiple demands.

Thus, the director decided to return to his land, in Coup in Little China , an action comedy that paid homage to Hong Kong martial arts cinema, which once again had Kurt Russell as the protagonist . With the current fashion for oriental cinema, it is possible that shooting it later would have improved the response at the box office, but at the time it was the director’s most resounding failure, who has since been relegated to series B forever.

With a very small budget, he paid homage to Hammer’s cinema in The Prince of Darkness , where a priest believes he has discovered the location where Satan dwells. He only liked the stalwarts of the filmmaker. He signed the script with the pseudonym Allan Quatermass, in honor of the character in the British production company’s films.

Although he was about to shoot Top Gun and Fatal Attraction , for various reasons he withdrew from both projects. He ends up filming the low-key They’re Alive , where the protagonist, played by Roddy Pipper (expressionless wrestling star) discovers that with glasses he can identify aliens living among humans in order to control them. He cast an even worse lead actor, the insufferable comedian Chevy Chase , in Memoirs of an Invisible Man , one of his most nefarious works, despite the amazing special effects.

In the 90s, the director is in the doldrums, although he manages to shoot In the Mouth of Fear , a tribute to HP Lovecraft ‘s literature with some element of interest, and The Town of the Damned , a bland remake of the science fiction classic. Vampires , a mixture of western and horror about a group of vampire hunters organized by the Vatican, has a prodigious start, but ends up being cliché and routine.

With the beginning of the 21st century, Carpenter definitively crashes with Ghosts of Mars , in which a group of police officers try to transfer a dangerous criminal to prison on the Red Planet. Though he draws inspiration again from Hawks’ westerns, the filmmaker has lost his touch of yesteryear, failing to make even the special effects or performances remotely believable.

Retired from the cinema for 9 years in which he only shot two correct episodes of the Masters of Horror series , he returned in 2010 with the once again failed Locked Up , with Amber Heard as a problematic young woman locked up in a psychiatric hospital. Although his cinema no longer makes money, remakes have proliferated in recent years, as Rob Zombie filmed Halloween. The origin and Rupert Wainwright dealt with Terror in the Mist . He also hit theaters The Thing , a prequel to his film, but much less.