The exact moment John Carpenter fell out of love with filmmaking: “Dead man walking”
It’s pretty tragic when a filmmaker you admire starts to make bad movies, and you realise there’s nothing you can do about the downturn that is here to stay for good, with John Carpenter being someone who’s fallen prey to this unfortunate affliction.
Carpenter burst onto the scene and captured everyone’s attention in the late 1970s with his innovative slasher Halloween, which was a massive success considering his indie budget, and in the coming years, his dominance in the horror genre, and eventually action, too, made him a household name. However, it was only a matter of time before he became, to put it brutally, a has-been who’s not been within sniffing distance of a good film in years.
With movies like The Fog, The Thing, Escape From New York, and They Live all emerging in the 1980s, you could forgive him for some more questionable releases, like Big Trouble in Little China. By the 1990s, though, there was no excuse for the cinematic abominations he began to make, starting with Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a sci-fi-esque comedy-drama that bombed at the box office and with critics.
Things only turned worse when he decided to remake Village of the Damned, the classic British horror featuring menacingly creepy children, marking a downturn in quality from Carpenter, who had once seemed like the guiding light of horror with the release of Halloween; truly, how things can change.
The 21st century has seen the director make just two films, Ghosts of Mars in 2001 and The Ward in 2010, and it’s now clear that he is done with making movies, although he should’ve thrown in the towel long before to avoid leaving a tainted footprint.
It became apparent that Carpenter had fallen out of love with filmmaking, finding it a draining experience rather than one that got his creativity flowing. It’s understandable that sometimes you just stop loving something you once adored, but when it’s your career and your reputation on the line, things get tricky, with Ghosts of Mars signalling to him that he was already pushing himself to the limit, realising the process of making a movie had become simply too taxing with age.
Discussing clocking the moment of his need to take a step back, Carpenter told AV Club, “It hit me when I was looking at the extras for the DVD of Ghosts Of Mars. It showed me at the beginning of the process on the set. I looked okay. Then it showed me at the very end of the process, doing the music. I was like a dead man. Dead man walking.”
That was the moment real alarm bells went off: “I thought, ‘Okay. All right. I can’t do this for a while. I just can’t’. I thought it was a good time to stop,” he continued, so, he didn’t make another movie for nine years, although maybe he should’ve listened to himself, because The Ward was also a huge flop, essentially ending Carpenter’s career as a director for good.
