A Career in Review: John Carpenter

Having directed one of the most respected and imitated horror films in history with Halloween (1978), John Carpenter is a director that constantly defies audience expectations with his mixture of adult horror and pulp novel fantasy and science fiction.

Carpenter was born on January 16, 1948 in Carthage, New York. In the sixties he began making short films before winning an Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Subject in 1970 for The Resurrection of Bronco Billy (1970). He attended the Western Kentucky University before transferring to USC film school where he started work on his first feature length film Dark Star (1974). While at USC he would meet with future film collaborators Tommy Lee Wallace (who edited Halloween and The Fog and who directed Halloween III: Season of the Witch) and Nick Castle (who acted in Halloween and Dark Star).

With the success of Dark Star Carpenter moved onto heavier material with the gang war epic Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which saw cops teaming up with criminals during a siege led by an animalistic gang. This film proved that Carpenter was at ease with action just as easily as the science fiction satire of Dark Star. Assault was heavily influenced by Carpenter's favorite director Howard Hawks, whom also influenced Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) and its sequel L.A. (1996), Vampires (1998), and Ghosts of Mars (2001), among others.

In 1978 Carpenter would forever be associated with the horror genre when Halloween assaulted audiences. This nightmare of pure evil would lead Carpenter down a dark road of terror that includes his contributions to Halloween II and Halloween III, as well as The Thing (1982), Prince of Darkness (1987), and In the Mouth of Madness (1995). Halloween would also become one of the films that many mainstream audiences believe Carpenter was never able to surpass as a director. Although Halloween is his most financially successful film (grossing $47 million in regards to its meager $325,000 budget), he would never be able to affect audiences as well as that film did. Many of his films despite a meager box office have gone on to become cult classics such as The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China (1986), They Live (1988) and The Fog (1980).

He's had a couple commercial successes with the Stephen King based Christine (1983), which grossed $21 million, and Starman (1984), which grossed $28 million.. He also has had a little success in the producing arena with the first two sequels to Halloween as well as the two sequels to Vampires and the remake of his The Fog as well as The Philadelphia Experiment (1984) and Black Moon Rising (1986). The later one he also wrote.

As a writer Carpenter has written many films, those he has directed as well as those directed by others as well as several made for television films some of which include Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Someone's Watching Me (1978), El Diablo (1990), Blood River (1991), Better Late Than Never (1979), and Zuma Beach (1978).

Most of his success is due in part by his dedicated fan base who continue to support even the most mundane of Carpenter's films, such as Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and Body Bags (1993) and the remake of Village of the Damned (1995), while at the same time cherishing his most obscure of films such as his abysmal remake of The Thing, the Lovecraft inspired In the Mouth of Madness, or the Chinese fantasy epic Big Trouble in Little China.

Carpenter has never been one to follow the trend instead finding solace in the fact that audiences appreciate his work more when he's not copying from the latest hit genre film. In 2006 he contributed to the horror anthology show Masters of Horror with his entry Cigarette Burns, which is a thematic companion peace to In the Mouth of Madness. This was hailed as one of the standout episodes in the first season. His second season episode Pro-Life was equally praised confirming that Carpenter is still on the right track even after all these years.