Volume 1, Issue 1 – October 1998

John Carpenter

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, director John Carpenter must be the most flattered filmmaker around.

Kurt Russell and Jamie Lee Curtis want Carpenter to make sequels to their early hits. Twenty years after the release of Carpenter’s Halloween, studios can’t grind out Halloween knock-offs fast enough to meet box office demand.

“I know that the producer of The Thing went to Universal recently and pitched them the idea of making The Thing II. But he said: ‘Imagine it: these teenagers arrive in Antarctica…’” Carpenter told fans at the Atlanta, Ga., science fiction convention DragonCon on September 4.

The audience laughed when Carpenter added he didn’t think it was going to work. But the director’s tone was wry. In the 28 years since his student short, The Resurrection of Bronco Billy, won an Academy Award, he’s seen stranger cinematic couplings.

Carpenter’s own career is no less unlikely. Although best known for the seminal slasher flick Halloween and other horrors, Carpenter’s credits range from the TV biopic Elvis to the lush science fiction romance Starman. Carpenter can neither read nor write music, yet he composes and plays the scores to most of his movies.

Carpenter has streaks of big screen homers, then strikes out repeatedly. Halloween, starring the young Jamie Lee Curtis, earned $75 million on a budget of $300,000. But Halloween III, in which a shadowy conspiracy seeks to incite mass death through a mix of sorcery and TV advertising, was in Carpenter’s words, “financially, a terrible mistake.”

In Carpenter’s 1981 Escape from New York, leather-garbed Snake “I thought you was dead” Plisskin (Russell) redefined swashbuckling for the post-apocalyptic age as he journeyed through the penal colony of Manhattan. But audiences and critics alike sloughed off the 1996 Carpenter/Russell sequel, Escape from L.A., as another pointless remake of a “classic.”

The phrase “pointless remake” routinely finds its way into the first reviews of new Carpenter movies, including films like The Thing, which later achieve “classic” status. Popular and critical opinion of his work seesaws from film to film, hour to hour.

Carpenter strives to set himself above the furor. “I think every director goes through that,” he said. “You’re a genius for a while, then you’re a bum for a while.”

Real or reel, Carpenter’s attitude must be easier to sustain now that people are calling him a genius again. His latest movie, Vampires, played to packed houses in France for months. From the almost ear-splitting buzz on the Internet, on public Web sites and private lists, the movie is a shot of distilled darkness — taut, gripping and infinitely seductive.

Carpenter calls the movie, “Vlad the Impaler meets The Wild Bunch.” Despite its supernatural elements, the story would’ve made Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah feel right at home. Vampires, based on James Steakley’s novel, explores some of Peckinpah’s favorite themes: hard-living heroes hellbent on revenge, and the hell that awaits them at the end of their quest.

These themes obsess Carpenter too. Carpenter loves westerns, and he emphasizes the classic western elements in Steakley’s tale. In Carpenter’s hands, the Vampires’ New Mexico locales become more than scenery. The lovingly framed vistas deliberately evoke the majestic West of director Howard Hawk’s Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

The sere, unforgiving beauty of the landscape also makes sense of the characters’ casual cruelties. Solitary mountains rear from the flat desert floor. Wind-blasted rocks the size of skyscrapers and thick-walled adobe fortresses dwarf the living and Undead.

Or most of them. James Woods and Daniel Baldwin head the cast of Vampires. But imposing Thomas Ian Griffith, who plays head vampire Valek, is getting all the audience attention. Griffith’s “hot” vampire appeals to female viewers too — a box office plus that pleases and amuses Carpenter. Except for Kurt Russell, women seldom go to Carpenter films for the stars.

U.S. audiences won’t see Vampires until October 30. Far from hurting the film, the delayed U.S. release whetted viewer appetite and created a sense of mystery Carpenter cheerfully dispels.

“The company that made the movie, Largo Entertainment, is a foreign sales company,” Carpenter said. And the way they arrange for their movies to get made is they sell the foreign rights first. So France’s release schedule was first on the docket.

“Back in December, there was a big screening for the studios for the domestic release. The studios all went to see it, and it ended up in a bidding war between Sony and 20th Century Fox. Sony won it. But by the time Sony won, the French release was already out. That’s the story.”

The story of Vampires’ release also highlights another of the contrasts that make up John Carpenter. Although viewed as the ultimate “anti-mainstream” and “anti-Hollywood” director, Carpenter is steeped in the business of moviemaking.

It could be a survival tactic.

“I come from a different generation than a lot of the audience and a lot of the film makers today. When I was studying movies and watching films — back in the old days before all of you were born — movies had endings that were darker and uncertain.

“But this is a modern age that uses audience research and test marketing to determine the endings of the movies you’re watching,” Carpenter said. “And if you notice, the good guy always wins. The adulterers are always punished. Mistresses are killed. Good wins out over evil.”

Which cannot be said with certainty about the ending of any Carpenter film except, perhaps, his kung-fu extravaganza Big Trouble in Little China. Yet Carpenter remains a “brand name” director with his name listed over the credits in a decade that views horror movies, in Carpenter’s words, “a little bit like pornography.”

His dark endings appear on the screen as he shot them. Carpenter says he’s filmed only one alternate ending for a movie. That ending, which appears in the special edition release of The Thing, is the one where Kurt Russell, the film’s hero, survives.

Or it could be that Carpenter simply enjoys the game of moviemaking. He’ll direct anything on TV “if they pay me, sure.” He alternates between big budget films and smaller projects and expounds on the virtues of both.

“If you do a lower budget movie,” Carpenter noted, “you can retain the final cut, because if the investor or the studio feels you’re making the film for a low enough budget, they feel they can make their money back no matter what. So you get a lot of creative freedom.

“What you don’t get on a low budget film is a whole lot of money to pour on the project. So you have to be more inventive, and sometimes more creative in how you tell the story, because you don’t have the money. You don’t have the spectacle to put up there.”

Carpenter continued: “In terms of a big budget situation, it’s great to tackle a movie that has a lot of special effects, that’s bigger in scope, the canvas is large. It’s fun for a director to do. But what you give up as that creative freedom, that personal point of view, because the minute you’re spending that much money, you have a responsibility to the people who put it up to make sure there’s a good shot at getting their money back. That’s just being a good businessman.

“So I’ve bounced back and forth in my career between making bigger budget films and making small budget films,” Carpenter added. “Whenever I can’t stand it anymore, I’ll make a little one, because that one’s mine. But whenever I get tired of that, I’ll try a bigger budget film.”

Carpenter believes much of the success of a movie depends on the personalities of the people who run the studios. “What kind of respect do they have for the film makers? What are they looking for? It’s those type of questions I ask myself whenever I’m going to make a film,” Carpenter said.

With Vampires, it appears he got the right answers.

Jean Marie Ward