The brutal scene John Carpenter regrets making
No director has been more integral to the horror genre than John Carpenter. Even though the effects and quality of the original Halloween might seem cheap today, his brilliant use of camera techniques and creating underlying tension has turned it into a modern classic. Though Carpenter may have found his wheelhouse working in the horror genre, there were more than a few times when he decided to go too far.
A few years before releasing his classic movie, Carpenter had already come under fire for his work on the film Assault on Precinct 13. Following the tale of a police officer trying to defend his town from a vicious criminal gang, Carpenter was given pushback from the MPAA before the movie was even shown in theatres.
At the start of the film, we see the first instance of how ruthless the criminal ring can be, coming across a young girl as she is eating ice cream. Coming out of nowhere, the gang kills her in broad daylight as they move on, which the studio found far too disturbing to include in the film.
While the scene at least gives context to the heartless criminals the movie is portraying, the MPAA was originally going to give the movie an X rating before Carpenter promised to edit the shots out…which he promptly did not do. Although the studio was shown a version of the film that took out the child murder scene, Carpenter would send the uncensored version to movie theatres, with fans being shocked and horrified from the minute they sat down.
Despite the effects looking relatively cheap today, the scene does accomplish precisely what it’s designed to do: filling the audience with dread in the first few minutes. Carpenter may have gotten the horror angle he wanted, but he also regretted going through with the scene.
Looking back on the movie, Carpenter thought the child’s death was a bit unnecessary, recalling, “We had a scene where a little girl gets killed with a gun, and it was pretty horrible at the time – explicit. I don’t think I’d do it again, but I was young and stupid… I don’t really think it was very clever, it was pretty ham-fisted.”
While there’s a case to be made that Carpenter was trying to play the edgy angle with this scene, it at least frames the villains in the audience’s mind a bit better. As opposed to the nuanced movie villains of today, you know right from the first time these characters are shown that they are not to be reckoned with, which makes it all the more special when they are dealt with properly later.
Even though Carpenter did have a bit of an axe to grind on Assault on Precinct 13, his next turn to horror on Halloween left an even bigger impact on viewers. Following a masked murderer slowly stalking any prey he can get his hands on, fans were horrified by how realistic some of the killings felt at the time, especially with the stark musical accompaniment matching Michael Myers’ footsteps at every turn.
Carpenter would up the ante even further in his following films, making insane practical effects look horrifying in movies like The Thing. Assault on Precinct 13 may have a few parts that Carpenter thought unnecessary, but there was no better way to introduce horror fans to his style than this.
