{"id":701042,"date":"2026-07-20T05:27:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T05:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/701042\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T05:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T05:27:09","slug":"everything-i-know-about-evil-i-learned-in-that-small-town-john-carpenter-on-terrifying-the-world-with-halloween-the-thing-and-the-fog-john-carpenter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/701042\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Everything I know about evil I learned in that small town\u2019: John Carpenter on terrifying the world with Halloween, The Thing and The Fog | John Carpenter"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2024, John Carpenter<\/a> had a dream that sounds like one of his movies: it involved a portal to the underworld beneath a disused church, monstrous demons and people being turned inside out. \u201cI woke up and thought: wow! What an elaborate story,\u201d he says. \u201cI rarely have cinematic dreams, but this was one of them.\u201d He liked it so much that he has turned it into a graphic novel, Cathedral, with an accompanying soundtrack. \u201cIt seemed to fit this heavy metal groove that we were starting on, and it worked out pretty well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most people would consider this a nightmare rather than a dream, I suggest. \u201cNo. Nightmares, for me, are personal \u2013 something that happened to me,\u201d he replies. \u201cUsually my nightmares are, I\u2019m directing a movie and no one will listen to me. No one will follow my directions. Seriously, that\u2019s what I wake up from.\u201d<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a Freudian analyst to unpack that one. Carpenter\u2019s film career effectively wound down at the end of the 20th century, after 25 years of defiantly making movies his own way \u2013 often tense, terrifying, violent, gory movies. He is the epitome of the stubbornly independent film-maker, who demands complete creative control, who goes further than Hollywood studios would usually dare and whose name above the title is a seal of cult quality. \u201c\u2018Don\u2019t tell me what to do\u2019 is John Carpenter\u2019s credo!\u201d he tells me. Few of his movies were commercial hits at the time, though, and a great many were the opposite, including his final two movies, 2001\u2019s Ghosts of Mars and 2010\u2019s The Ward.<\/p>\n

Carpenter and Kurt Russell on the set of Big Trouble in Little China (1986). Photograph: Photos 12\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Does he miss making movies? \u201cYes and no,\u201d he says. He is talking on a video call from his home in the Hollywood Hills and, despite his reputation as an uncompromising grouch, the 78-year-old is in good spirits and good health. \u201cIt\u2019s really weird. Yes, because I\u2019ve always loved cinema and the process. But no, working in the studio system in Hollywood is very difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

He seems to have managed pretty well, I suggest. \u201cYou have to fight to do that. That\u2019s the unfortunate thing. And that takes a little bit out of you, as a person, every time it has to happen,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason why directors come out of the other end looking as if they\u2019ve been in a war. Because they have been: it\u2019s a creative war. And so there are a lot of drunks who are directors, that\u2019s one way of coping, or taking other drugs. Anyway, we won\u2019t get into all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was that ever you? I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, no, no, let\u2019s not,\u201d he waves off the question. \u201cI\u2019m not going to tell you all my secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carpenter may have lost battles, but he won the war. Many of his films are considered classics: Halloween, The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, Escape from New York. And Carpenter\u2019s film-making style continues to cast a long shadow \u2013 not only over horror and sci-fi movies, but also mainstream television, especially anything set in the 80s or with the look of that era (Stranger Things, say, or the current Widow\u2019s Bay), and even philosophical culture-mongers such as Adam Curtis and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. Musicians also bow to him: his spare, synth-driven scores have been namechecked by many, from Portishead to Daft Punk, Trent Reznor to Hans Zimmer.<\/p>\n

Carpenter seems unaware of all this. When I tell him there is almost a paragraph of his Wikipedia entry listing film-makers who have cited him as an influence \u2013 Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, James Cameron (who worked for Carpenter once) \u2013 he seems genuinely oblivious, pained even. \u201cWhat does that mean to me? I can\u2019t do anything about that. It\u2019s wonderful, I think it\u2019s fantastic, I don\u2019t know why. If you were gonna emulate a director, you\u2019d emulate somebody whose movies aren\u2019t panned.\u201d It sounds as if he is not online much then? \u201cNo! I rebelled against mobile phones. I rebelled against computers. I can\u2019t do that, I don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carpenter\u2019s 1974 debut, Dark Star. Photograph: United Archives\/FilmPublicityArchive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Carpenter\u2019s rebellious streak goes way back, and is inseparable from his art. His father was a music teacher and an orchestra violinist. In 1953, when John was five, the family relocated from northern New York when his dad got a teaching job at Western Kentucky University. \u201cIt was the Jim Crow south in the 1950s. Boy, were we fish out of water,\u201d Carpenter says. \u201cEverything I know about evil I learned in that small town of Bowling Green, Kentucky.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father had encouraged John to learn violin too. \u201cYou\u2019re walking to school in the morning and you have a violin under your arm; these country boys in Kentucky decided I was great to beat up. I was a mark for violence with my violin, which made me hate it all the more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Classical music\u2019s loss would ultimately be synthwave\u2019s gain, but Carpenter was also just the right age to hook into the 60s counterculture. He rebelled against everything, he says: the town he grew up in, the Vietnam war, the system, \u201call forms of authority\u201d. But he came to love and appreciate his father. \u201cHe told me early on: just create something, whether it\u2019s music, writing, painting; whatever it is, create. And here I am, still doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Working in the studio system in Hollywood is very difficult\u2019 \u2026 Carpenter in his office. Photograph: Philip Cheung\/The Guardian; photographer\u2019s assistant: Jhovany Quiroz<\/p>\n

His mother regularly took him to the movies. \u201cShe gave me the gift of fantasy, and my father gave me a rigorous approach to creating.\u201d Seeing the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet when he was eight was a transformative experience: \u201cI remember walking out and thinking: I\u2019m gonna be a movie director.\u201d<\/p>\n

While near-contemporaries such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were taking over Hollywood through the front door, Carpenter operated on the genre sidelines. His 1974 debut, Dark Star, was a lo-fi hippy parody of Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which saw space travel less as a symphonic leap into the future and more as a grotty flatshare: boring, unhygienic and fractious. It was made on a shoestring, with egg cartons for spaceship interiors and an inflatable beach ball for an alien, but the movie did reasonably well, alerting Hollywood to the fact he could produce results on a small budget.<\/p>\n

It all came together with Halloween, in 1978. Led by a then unknown Jamie Lee Curtis and made for $325,000, it grossed over $70m. It opened the floodgates for highly profitable low-budget horror films and is often cited as the foundational slasher movie. Carpenter makes no such claims. \u201cI put in what I thought was the summation of all the horror that I had seen. I wanted to use the audience, manipulate them like a ride at a carnival and have them scream, jump, not knowing where the thing is. Is it a man? Is it not a man?\u201d<\/p>\n

A then relatively unknown Jamie Lee Curtis, in Halloween (1978). Photograph: Falcon International\/Kim Gottlieb\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Halloween was an assault on cosy smalltown domesticity: the horror wasn\u2019t confined to a haunted house or a gothic castle; it was in your neighbourhood, in your home, preying on you and your children. \u201cThat\u2019s the whole opening,\u201d Carpenter says, \u201cwhen it pulls back with this little kid with a knife in his hand [young Michael Myers, the future slasher] and it reveals we\u2019re in the suburbs. That\u2019s the whole idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inevitably, the studio wanted Carpenter to repeat the trick with a sequel, especially since Halloween left the fate of its anti-hero open-ended. \u201cI didn\u2019t think there was any story left,\u201d he says. \u201cBut they \u2013 meaning Universal Pictures and the producers \u2013 were gonna do it whether I wanted to or not. So what are you gonna do?\u201d Carpenter wrote, but did not direct, Halloween 2, and after that: \u201cThey took it out of my hands, but they had to pay me every time they made a movie. I sit on the couch and a cheque arrives in my hand. What\u2019s wrong with that? I have to admit, with all the rebellion in the world, I am a happy capitalist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Carpenter continued to stick it to the man, puncturing his era\u2019s cheery certainties and self-congratulation, ridiculing authority figures, standing up for the underclass. It\u2019s there in Assault on Precinct 13, where racial, gender and law-enforcement hierarchies are upended during a relentless night-time siege. It\u2019s there in Escape from New York, where Kurt Russell\u2019s snarling anti-hero is forced to rescue Donald Pleasence\u2019s feeble American president, but has zero respect for him. It\u2019s even there in his goofy action comedy Big Trouble In Little China \u2013 a movie where the ostensible leading man (Russell again) is actually a klutzy sidekick and the Asian cast are the real action heroes.<\/p>\n

Horror masterpiece \u2026 Kurt Russell in The Thing. Photograph: Universal Pictures\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Carpenter was possibly at his most out of step with American sensibilities in the summer of 1982, when he released The Thing \u2013 a paranoid sci-fi thriller centred on a shape-shifting alien picking off members of an Arctic research station, aided by some fantastically disgusting special effects. It is now recognised as a horror masterpiece. Back then, it arrived in cinemas two weeks after Steven Spielberg\u2019s ET the Extra-Terrestrial. The contrast could not have been more jarring.<\/p>\n

Carpenter recalls going to see ET that summer: \u201cI remember seeing the boys on their bicycles and the ET wrapped up, and then they go up into the sky magically. And that\u2019s when I threw up.\u201d He\u2019s joking, but only half. \u201cI was like: \u2018Come on, don\u2019t do this.\u2019\u201d He\u2019s actually full of admiration for Spielberg, not least for reading the 80s zeitgeist. But he prefers his version: \u201cIf you really want to know the truth about alien encounters, I think that my movies are more realistic about what will happen. Think of the settlers who came to the United States and their encounters with the Indians. It didn\u2019t really go so well for the Indians, OK? Our encounters with aliens \u2013 I imagine it won\u2019t go so well for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, Carpenter did make a relatively feelgood alien story two years later: 1984\u2019s Starman, in which a visiting alien inhabits the body of Karen Allen\u2019s deceased husband, Jeff Bridges (who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance). The result was almost a grownup ET; a tender, comical, road-trip romance. It showed Carpenter\u2019s surprising capacity for sensitive, emotional drama. \u201cI wanted to show I could do it,\u201d he says. \u201cBicycles taking off and flying \u2013 I wasn\u2019t going to go that far, but \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

John Carpenter with his son, Cody (left), and godson, Daniel Davies. Photograph: Sophie Gransard<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s They Live, from 1988, which seems to have taken on a life of its own. The story concerns a homeless worker (played by wrestler \u201cRowdy\u201d Roddy Piper) who discovers some sunglasses that reveal subliminal propaganda messages beneath every advert, magazine and piece of packaging he sees: \u201cObey\u201d, \u201cMarry and Reproduce\u201d, \u201cStay Asleep\u201d. Even the dollar bills secretly say: \u201cThis is your God.\u201d The glasses also reveal the aliens who walk among us undetected, controlling humanity.<\/p>\n

Not exactly subtle, and They Live is by no means his best film (Piper is no Kurt Russell), but it has become part of the culture, endlessly mimicked, turned into memes<\/a> and even co-opted into a successful clothing brand<\/a> by the graphic artist Shepard Fairey \u2013 the ultimate irony, perhaps. Just last week, pranksters doctored billboards for Meta\u2019s AI glasses<\/a> They-Live-style, revealing Kylie Jenner to be an alien and the ad\u2019s subliminal slogan to be \u201cWe\u2019re always watching\u201d.<\/p>\n

Carpenter was specifically targeting the Reagan era in They Live, he says, the hyperconsumerism, but also the inequality \u2013 contrasting Piper\u2019s homeless community with the affluent heights of 80s Los Angeles. \u201cIt\u2019s a documentary, and it didn\u2019t end. It\u2019s still going on now, even worse.\u201d He stops himself. \u201cYou\u2019ll get me ranting here, and that\u2019s not a good thing.\u201d But, almost needless to say, he\u2019s depressed by the state of his country. \u201cThings are bad here. I guess you guys realise that over there?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, the Slovenian philosopher, called They Live \u201cone of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left\u201d in his 2012 documentary The Pervert\u2019s Guide to Ideology, which saw the film as a metaphor for not just consumerism but ideology as a whole: \u201cWhen you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It\u2019s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019d go that far,\u201d says Carpenter (he has never heard of \u017di\u017eek, and asks me to send him the clip). \u201cIt\u2019s actually democracy under pressure from the dictator. I\u2019m a real sucker for American values. There\u2019s a lot of people like me and we\u2019re constantly fighting, but we\u2019re doing it within the system. I vote. That\u2019s the only power I have. I\u2019m not a rich guy like these guys. And I keep believing that we\u2019ll fight them off one day. We\u2019re all going to be like Roddy Piper, we\u2019re going to give \u2019em the finger at the end there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Targeting the Reagan era\u2019 \u2026 an alien policeman in Carpenter\u2019s 1988 film They Live. Photograph: MCA\/Universal\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Of course, voting is not the only power Carpenter has; his cinema is a textbook lesson in how beliefs and values can be transmitted through popular culture, even when they are in opposition to the beliefs of those who control that culture. But he is happy for others to take up the fight these days. He didn\u2019t realise how much film-making was taking out of him until he stopped doing it, he says. \u201cI was exhausted, and then I took this extended vacation and I got happier the more I was away from the thing I love. I thought: what\u2019s going on here? I was addicted to moviemaking and I needed rehab. So I had to get away from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since then, he has toured the world playing his film music, with his son Cody and his godson, Daniel Davies, as well as recording new material. He has no regrets. \u201cI\u2019ve had great experiences with actors. I loved working with Sam Neill [who led Carpenter\u2019s 1994 mind-bender In The Mouth of Madness], Jeff Bridges, Kurt, and my leading ladies have been great. I love them all. I\u2019ve had a fantastic time. Now I\u2019m playing music. I mean, it doesn\u2019t get better than this. It really doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of his days are spent at a leisurely pace, he says. \u201cBasketball, the news and video games. That\u2019s John\u2019s entertainment. Then I go to have long, beautiful sleeps \u2013 and dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Carpenter\u2019s new album, Cathedral, is released on 7 August on Sacred Bones Records. His first graphic novel is released on 4 August4 via Storm King Comics<\/p>\n

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