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Hi. I'm Wheeler Winston Dixon, and this is Frame By Frame.
And we're here to talk about John Carpenter.
John Carpenter is perhaps the most influential horror film director of the 2nd half of the 20th century,
along with Terrence Fisher, the great Hammer horror director, who was one of his idols.
Carpenter went to USC, and there he made a film called "Dark Star," which was a science fiction film,
shot in 16mm. That film was a student film that got expanded to a feature.
This lead to his first real movie, "Assault on Precinct 13," and it didn't really do much business
until it went to the London film festival and suddenly it was discovered as one of the hits of the festival.
COP: We got a war going on down here, and we can't find the damned thing."
This led to "Halloween," which was shot for around $300K, and grossed more than $120 million world-wide,
and firmly set him on the path of being a horror auteur.
GIRL SCREAMS
The other thing about Carpenter is that he was, and remains, a triple or quadruple "threat".
On "Assault on Precinct 13," for example, he edited the film under the name "John T. Chance."
He also wrote the screenplay. He also did the music track in addition to doing the directing.
So, this ability to do it all, more or less, really propelled him to the front of the horror genre.
After "Halloween" he made "The Fog," and then "Escape From New York."
But then he made his masterpiece in 1982, his version of "The Thing."
DOCTOR: "Clear! Arrrgh!"
This is a riff on the Howard Hawks 1951 version, and this was a film which Universal funded
to quite an aggressive level... around $25 million.
But unfortunately Universal put it out at the same time as "E.T." even though Carpenter begged them not to
The interesting thing about "The Thing" therefore, is that although it failed at the box office,
now it's considered an iconic classic, along with Rob Bottton's special effects with an assist by Stan Winston,
and an extremely strong cast with Wilford Brimly and Kurt Russel.
Just an amazing piece of work.
After this film, unfortunately Carpenter found it hard to find financing for his other films because
of "The Thing"'s commercial failure.
And he went on to make "Starman" and "They Live."
But his later films don't have the same intensity of his early films.
And at this point he is semi-retired from the film business,
but his early films, particularly "Assault on Precinct 13," "Halloween," "The Fog," "Escape From New York,"
and especially his iconic masterpiece, "The Thing" will live forever as some of the greatest horror films ever made.