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 Horror supremo
John Carpenter welcomes Blockbuster's Marshall
Julius into his weird, wild world.
He smokes
endlessly, wears faded blue jeans, talks about sports. By all
appearances, John Carpenter is the guy next door. Have a drink
with him, shoot the breeze, what the hell? Only thing is, he's
the man who made Halloween, Christine and The Thing. He is, in
fact, the best friend a horror movie ever had, a devoted fan
of the genre with the power to crawl under our skin and scare
us half to death.
Monsters that cannot be
stopped. Worlds on the brink of destruction. Heroes who don't
give a damn. Horror or sci-fi, fantasy or comedy, Carpenter
knows exactly what we want and delivers the goods with style,
intelligence, and perhaps most important of all, humour.
Clearly, there's a lot more to him than the guy next door,
unless, that is, you happen to be neighbours with the likes of
Wes Craven, George Romero or Dario Argento. "I've always had a
real affinity for horror," confirms Carpenter, "and I know the
genre very well. But the thing is, it's not always my choice,
I just get offered a lot of horror films." Not that
typecasting presents a problem. "It's like we say in the
States," he adds sagely, "you gotta dance with the one who
brung ya."
Following a childhood at the movies and a
brief stint in a rock 'n' roll band called The Kaleidoscopes,
Carpenter decided that it was time to go to film school. "I
was making pretty good money with the band, meeting girls, and
it was fun. I could have stayed with them, but I decided to go
to college and get into movies because that was what I'd
wanted to do since I was a kid. I wanted to direct, I wanted
to make what people saw. I didn't want to act, I didn't want
to be in front of the camera, I wanted to be behind the
scenes, putting it all together." The experience proved
invaluable, shaping Carpenter's movie-making philosophy. "When
I went to film school, the first thing they said to me was,
'look, you're here to make personal films, you gotta make a
movie that means something to you, you gotta make a movie with
your heart. It doesn't matter what it's about,' the instructor
said, 'it can be about digging a ditch, but make it about
something you care about, and make it your vision'. So that's
what I did, and what I still do. I mean, you collaborate with
everybody on the set, with the actors, the cameramen and
everyone else, but ultimately it's your vision, your
movie."
Carpenter's directing method is deceptively
simple: turn up on the first day of shooting, and see what
happens next. "I try never to plan anything if I can help it,
and just see what happens when we get there. As a director you
try to let your instincts and your emotions take over and
guide you on your way, because if you plan a film it just
looks planned, at least it does to me. I can almost see the
storyboards flipping by, like the film was made by a computer,
but it's not supposed to be like that."
Carpenter is especially distressed by
writing guides which promise to unlock the secrets of a
successful screenplay. The director maintains that the only
rule, the only formula he will follow, is that there are no
rules. "I bought a book on screenwriting a little while ago,
just to browse through it, and," he continues, shaking his
head, "it was a real piece of trash. It said '...unhappy
endings are a thing of the past', and that only stupid people
write them, but when I was growing up I saw all kinds of
different movies with all kinds of different endings." But
there are a lot of people, the director acknowledges, who
simply hate uncertainty. "What about The Thing? One of the
things that everyone got upset about with that movie was its
open ending. I remember we had a research screening and one
girl, I think she was about 17 or 18, asked me what happened
at the end. 'Who was the Thing?' So I said, 'Well, you have to
use your imagination,' and she moaned, 'God, I hate that.' Now
that's what I call scary."
Carpenter devotees have
long since learnt not to expect neat little happy endings from
the director. The futuristic thriller Escape From New York is
a perfect case in point. When ultimate anti-hero Snake
(Carpenter regular Kurt Russell) mangles an audio tape
containing a speech vital to world peace, he condemns the
planet to death. Why did he do it? Why did he rob the movie of
its happy ending? Why the hell not? "As a matter of fact, I
recently I went up to Aspen to visit Kurt, and we were sitting
around talking about the old days, talking about that
character. Snake is a guy who believes in himself. Neither
world, not the police state nor the prison, is any good, and
he's the baddest of the bad. So you're talking about an
unredeemingly bad future, and he destroys the hope of the
world by ripping out the tape, but to me it's a triumphant
moment. I love stuff like that, it's much more fun than always
winning."
In 1978, with a relatively tiny budget of
$300,000, Carpenter wrote, directed and composed the music for
Halloween. A guy in a mask stalked Jamie Lee Curtis and $75
million worth of people flocked to the cinema to be frightened
senseless. Years later, Carpenter can still send 'em screaming
from the aisles. Trouble is, he's one of the only directors
who can. "Everyone thinks it's easy to make horror movies
because a lot of people try it," he explains, "but it's harder
to make someone believe in that stuff than it is to show a
scene in real life. That's easy. You want two people to talk
in a scene in a restaurant. Nothing to it, their lines are
written down, you point the camera at this person, you point
the camera at that person, and you're all set. But it's much
harder to make you believe that something you know isn't true
is really happening. "You see, horror is an art form that,
apparently on the surface, wears its technique on its sleeve,
and a lot of directors believe that if they include enough of
the right elements - a monster, a dark house - they'll have a
good horror movie, but the truth is it's all in the story, and
if the stories aren't any good, that's where everything comes
apart.
"My biggest failures have been because
the stories were shi**y. I made one that had all the earmarks
of being a really frightening movie, but it was a big mistake
because I had no feeling for it. I had no feeling for the
source material, I had no feeling for what was going on. I
didn't find this out - stupid me - until I'd finished it, and
then I realised that I'd just walked through the project. I
wasn't scared by the subject, it wasn't something that
compelled me, and I didn't make it work for the audience. I
didn't do it right."
The odd misfire aside, Carpenter
is a director better known for getting it right. "There's some
other life-force that goes on in a film that makes it good,"
he adds with a grin, "and if everybody knew how to do it, it
wouldn't be special."
John
Carpenter filmography
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