‘Invisible Invaders’: The peculiar sci-fi horror movie John Carpenter calls a “classic”
If one were to list the greatest horror directors of all time, John Carpenter would undoubtedly make the list alongside the likes of Wes Craven, George A. Romero and William Friedkin. Gifting the 1980s with a signature style that would be copied and replicated by other filmmakers across the globe, Carpenter had a love for cinema that few others could truly match, as seen in his frenetic action flicks that fizzed with excitement.
A jack of all trades when it comes to genre filmmaking, Carpenter has made classics in the sci-fi and action genres as well, but at the end of the day, it’s horror that Carpenter is synonymous with, and there’s a very good reason for that. Including such films as Halloween, The Thing, Christine, The Fog, and They Live, Carpenter created distinctive visions that radiated style, making some of the scariest and most sophisticated horrors of the era.
If that wasn’t enough, he also composes a lot of film soundtracks, too, and deserves to be called one of the greatest – and perhaps most overlooked – film composers of all time.
Carpenter has made various movies that have become subversive classics, with the director gaining a reputation as a cult filmmaker. Yet, this shouldn’t sound degrading. Carpenter is a serious and artistic filmmaker of astonishing technical skill, and when he is really firing on all cylinders, he is practically untouchable. If any aspiring filmmakers want to make a horror film, watching Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween would allow them to learn everything there is to know about how to scare the audience.
Having said that, during a 2009 interview, Carpenter admitted, with endearing honesty, that he actually enjoys watching guilty pleasure, trashy movies more than the ‘classics’. One he highlighted was Invisible Invaders, a 1959 sci-fi flick directed by Edward L. Cahn, which tells the story of invisible aliens trying to invade the world by inhabiting human corpses, a plot no doubt influenced by the paranoia of the Cold War era. As Carpenter says, it’s similar to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but it was made almost a decade earlier.
Of the film, Carpenter said: “So compelling in a nutball way I can’t watch four seconds of this film without sitting down and staring at the whole thing. Stock footage. Clumsy narration. Cheap effects. The walking dead. A classic.”
When discussing his other favourite guilty pleasure movies, he named many other films – mostly sci-fi and horror films from the 1950s, but there are some outliers as well.
These include Blue Hawaii, one of the films from Elvis Presley’s less-than-stellar Hollywood career, and two notorious John Wayne vehicles: The Green Berets (which Wayne also directed), a vehemently anti-Communist Vietnam War flick and The Conqueror, a historical epic in which Wayne played Genghis Khan. Both films have been widely loathed over the years, especially the latter, but interestingly enough, Carpenter seems to really like them.
