The director John Carpenter admires most: “The man literally invented American cinema”
There aren’t many directors who can claim to have spearheaded an entire genre, but John Carpenter can. His 1978 horror movie Halloween is widely cited as the movie that popularised and set the template for the slasher genre, and it continues to be enormously influential for other filmmakers. By the time he made Halloween, Carpenter had already experimented with a wide range of genres, including science fiction and gritty thrillers. A year after the film was released, he tried his hand at musical biopics with Elvis, though he has stuck largely with horror and action movies ever since.
Another of the director’s claims to fame is music. He composed the scores for most of his movies, including Halloween and Escape from New York, helping to popularise synthesisers in Hollywood soundtracks. His work as a director and composer has been so influential, in fact, that his style is now almost cliché because of how frequently it has been repurposed by other filmmakers.
All of this has made Carpenter one of the most revered auteurs of the 1970s and ’80s, but although other directors might cite Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing as major inspirations, Carpenter himself is more than happy to give credit where credit is due when it comes to his own work. In a 2017 interview, he revealed who he thought was the most important influence on his and everyone else’s filmmaking in Hollywood.
“I consider Howard Hawks to be the greatest American director,” he said. “He’s the only director I know to have made a great movie in every genre… In my opinion, the man literally invented American cinema. He showed us ourselves, the way we are, the way we should be.”
Few would argue with his praise for Hawks, particularly regarding his mastery of various genres. Between 1930 and 1960, he made gangster movies, screwball comedies, westerns, science fiction films, musicals, and film noir, many of which are still held up as the greatest examples of their respective genres. His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby are the gold standards of screwball comedy. Red River and Rio Bravo are some of the greatest westerns ever made. And To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep are some of Humphrey Bogart’s best hardboiled crime dramas.
“Critics mention the one-take, moving camera style of Ophüls and Welles but somehow never get around to the amazing one-take opening shot of the original Scarface, made in 1932,” Carpenter said. “Hawks’s sense of comic timing is unsurpassed. Just take a look at His Girl Friday if you’re not convinced.”
The Halloween director made his own overt tribute to Hawks in his 1976 thriller Assault on Precinct 13. Following a police officer who tries to defend his precinct against a brutal criminal gang with the help of a few allies, it was a direct tribute to Hawks’s John Wayne classic Rio Bravo. The fact that Hawks’s film was a western and Carpenter’s was a gritty urban thriller is fitting, given Hawks’s penchant for genre exploration.
