John Carpenter
John Carpenter made movies awesome.
As a child of the 80's, I grew up on his films. His horror movies were genuinely shocking, with a blend of masterful suspense and heartpacked without being overly cluttered. He does what all the best directors do: he creates whole universes in a few brush strokes and invites the audience in.
If this is your first time getting into John Carpenter's work, you're in for a real treat. He'll pull you into amazing, fun, sexy, terrifying, action-packed stories, full of fantastic characters and unforgettable moments. Come join the legions of fans that have propelled Carpenter to his place among the most celebrated American directors of our time.
The Night He Came Home
John Carpenter is best known for the genre movies he directed during the late 70s and early 80s. He eschewed the Hollywood system for the bulk of his career and became one of the most successful independent filmmakers of all time. He has some stylistic trademarks, including his distinctive use of tracking steadicam shots and his selfprofessed western fanatic and many of his movies have strongly reworked western tropes, especially ''Assault on Precinct 13'', his exploitation film update of the classic John Wayne film ''Rio Bravo''.
John Carpenter is probably best known for the seminal 1978 horror film ''Halloween''. Made for around $320,000, this stark chiller about a madman stalking a trio of babysitters on Halloween night terrified fans all the world and made Carpenter's career. Halloween relies less on the explicit gore the slasher genre became notorious for and more on nearly unbearable suspense. Michael Myers, Carpenter's silent boogeyman, seems less a simple psychopath and more a thing of elemental darkness. The movie ratchets up the tension as heroic babysitter Laurie Strode struggles desperately to get away from the nearly unstoppable maniac. His next major motion picture was another horror film, 1980's ''The Fog''. An EC comicssoldier, as he's forced to enter the fortress city of New York in order to rescue the President. Finally, ''Big Trouble in Little China'' is a comedic action film featuring martial arts and sorcery as Kurt Russell strives to stop the fiendish demon Lo Pan in the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown.
The 90s were less kind to Carpenter. His films ''Ghosts of Mars, The Village of the Damned'', and ''Vampires'', weren't big successes and his output decreased. In the 2000s he became involved with the Masters of Horror project and released the fan favorite Cigarette Burns, which many rank among his best work. He has plans to return to horror, both with his upcoming feature film ''The Ward'' and his work on the horror game ''F.E.A.R. 3''.
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