(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 1 November 2025 19:45, UK
While Halloween wasn’t John Carpenter’s first film, it marked his proper entry into Hollywood as an indie filmmaker with the capabilities of making a huge commercial hit.
The slasher had an irreversible effect on horror, with a shit-tonne of copycat movies emerging in its wake, and with that came the start of the Halloween franchise, which has seen the villainous Michael Myers return to target his victims far too many times, especially Jamie Lee Curtis’ unforgettable final girl Laurie Strode.
However, Carpenter isn’t a fan of these endless sequels, adding them to his ever-growing roster of movies he dislikes, flatly admitting to Deadline, “I didn’t think there was any more story [after the first], and I didn’t want to do it again. All of my ideas were for the first Halloween; there shouldn’t have been any more! I’m flattered by the fact that people want to remake them, but they remake everything these days, so it doesn’t make me that special.”
While he was employed to write Halloween II, he wasn’t happy about it, cribbing, “Every night I sat there and wrote with a six pack of beer trying to get through this thing. And I didn’t do a very good job, but that was it. I couldn’t do any more.”
Besides these sequels, Carpenter also dislikes a fair few films that he had nothing to do with, like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which he thought was wildly overrated, despite winning a slew of awards, including the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar. “Oppenheimer was OK. It was alright. Everyone’s praising it as the movie of the century, I don’t know about that,” he claimed outright.
So, what about its summer 2023 box office opponent, Barbie? He wasn’t that impressed with it, either, elaborating, “Barbie. Did I like it? No comment”. While he was pleased that Greta Gerwig had earned so much success from the film, he couldn’t say he was all that bothered about the feminist tale of a doll experiencing the real world.
“Made by a woman. That’s incredible. That’s progress. I can’t promise you that I understood the damn movie or cared about it that much… However, I appreciate what she did,” Carpenter told AP News.
He was much more biting about another female-directed hit, though, picking for his ire The Substance, the Oscar-winning body horror helmed by Coralie Fargeat, who literally cited the filmmaker as one of her key inspirations behind the movie. Let’s hope she’s not easily offended by criticism, especially from one of her filmmaking idols.
At a Fan Expo, he asked a fan what they thought of the film, and being met with a “I loved it”, he offered with a cheeky chuckle that he wasn’t a fan. In good spirit, as the fan endeavoured to figure out if the man did like anything about the film, he responded with a flat and polite, “What did I like about The Substance? Zero”, and in response to the follow-up of what he did not like, he retorted eloquently, “Everything”.
Skipping details on why he detests the film so much, we are left to wonder why Carpenter isn’t keen on the gory deconstruction of female beauty standards, ageing, and the pressures of the time the entertainment industry sets on women. It’s a shame he didn’t like it, but at least he’s not afraid to share when a movie really doesn’t hit the mark for him.
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