When Halloween became one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time, John Carpenter went from a nobody whose first 2 features were ignored by critics and audiences to being the director who drew up the fool-proof blueprint for the slasher movie. The fact that he was a sophisticated filmmaker inspired by Welles, Hawks and Argento was lost on the clods that followed his example. Together with John Landis and Joe Dante, Carpenter was one of the first film buff directors, and his pictures are loaded with movie references (Halloweens Sheriff is named after the screenwriter of Rio Bravo) not in the pseudo-hip, show-off manner of modern filmmakers, but because he wanted to acknowledge his influences. When youre watching a John Carpenter movie, his passion for cinema all kinds of cinema is there is every frame. All of his films bear his personal stamp, and each has a certain look that other filmmakers have attempted to replicate, most successfully in It Follows. But nobody shoots a horror movie the way Carpenter does, and nobody else can make a seemingly empty street look as eerie as he does in Halloween and The Fog. On a side note, its perhaps worth noting that even though Carpenter also writes scripts, produces, edits and composes, he rejects the auteur label, which was the invention of the French and is therefore highly suspect.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
