The one director John Carpenter called a lying piece of shit: “I was incredibly supportive”
Ever since he exiled himself from directing after The Ward, which turned out to be a terrible swansong for such an influential filmmaker, John Carpenter has cast off the shackles of politeness and become increasingly belligerent, which he’s entitled to do.
Having spent years fighting an uphill battle against the studios that doubted his work, and may have had a point when The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China both flopped at the box office before becoming two of cinema’s most enduringly popular cult classics, he’s unloaded several barrages at modern cinema.
He can’t stand The Substance, despite making quite the name for himself in body horror, while the double-whammy of Barbie and Oppenheimer that dominated the cultural discourse in the summer of 2023 left him somewhere between bemused and irritated, placing him firmly in the minority on both counts.
Carpenter isn’t a fan of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he’s just one of many people in the business who never want to be anywhere near Chevy Chase ever again, and his interest in ever stepping behind the camera again evaporated a long time ago, with his current work/life balance of making music and playing video games keeping him happy.
However, even though he won’t be helming another picture, his name doesn’t stay out of the multiplex for too long, with Carpenter becoming one of Tinseltown’s most remade directors. Several of his most famous flicks have been rebooted or remade, sometimes with his involvement, but he drew the line when Rob Zombie alleged that the original Halloween director had brushed him off ahead of his do-over.
“He lied about me,” Carpenter maintained. “He said I was very cold to him when he told me he was going to make it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I said, ‘Make it your own movie, man. This is yours now. Don’t worry about me’. I was incredibly supportive. Why that piece of shit lied, I don’t know.”
Zombie’s updated take on the Michael Myers/Laurie Strode saga was a hit, as often tended to be the case in the early-to-mid-2000s when the boom period for remaking history’s most famous horrors was at its apex, but it was rubbish. Since it made money, it inevitably got a sequel, and that was even worse.
Carpenter has admired and enjoyed some of the rehashes based on his back catalogue, but not 2007’s Halloween. “I thought he took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much,” he explained. “I don’t care about that. He’s supposed to be a force of nature, he’s supposed to be almost supernatural, and he was too big, it wasn’t normal.”
When the time came for yet another return to Haddonfield, he was much more amenable to David Gordon Green taking the reins than Zombie. For one thing, he didn’t call him a lying piece of shit, and Carpenter had much more involvement as an executive producer and composer.
