The greatest movie monster of all time, according to John Carpenter: “He’s all-purpose”
If anyone knows anything about monsters, it’s acclaimed horror and sci-fi director John Carpenter.
Leaving an indelible mark on cinema during the New Hollywood era’s shift to the 1980s’ glossy big studio comeback, Carpenter’s rogues gallery of nightmarish conjurings stands confidently beside the Universal or Hammer Horror monster canon. Michael Myers’ stony-faced slasher threat lurking in Halloween’s suburbs, the putrid pirate ghosts nebulously ensconced in The Fog’s deadly mist, or the shapeshifting alien parasite digesting an Antarctic science crew in the surreal claustrophobia of The Thing, Carpenter has seared into the public consciousness illustrations of fright that few can rival.
A child of the B-movie picture’s heyday, Carpenter would devour the genre pictures of his 1950s youth. In addition to a love of Howard Hawks and John Ford’s westerns, the space frontier and low-budget horror trips are what sunk its teeth into the young Carpenter, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, or The Thing from Another World—which Carpenter would perfect in 1982—proving more foundational to the future filmmaker than any of the Ben-Hur A-pictures at the time.
With his last feature being 2010’s The Ward, nearly ten years after his atrocious Ghosts of Mars flop, Carpenter appears to stay put whiling away the time playing video games than he does ever stepping behind the camera for one last horror hurrah. Yet, his monster pedigree still sees the elder frightmaster roped in for the odd presentation or movie event. One such cameo took place in November 2022, when a certain icon of the creature feature was enjoying its 68th birthday celebration. “He’s an all-purpose monster,” Carpenter told Den of Geek. “Anything you need, he’s there for you”.
First released in 1954, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, or Gojira in the Romanised tongue, established a Japanese fixture of cinema that surpassed anything from the lauded Akira Kurosawa in sheer pop cultural stature. While more recognised for kickstarting the Toho studios’ rubber-costumed Kaiju fights with the expanded cohort of colossal entities from the laser-shooting Mothra to even a King Kong guest spot, such campy wrestling matches, while much fun, obscured a deeper and darker anxiety at the heart of Godzilla’s lore.
Awakened by an underwater hydrogen bomb, the ancient elemental threat’s subsequent destruction of Tokyo would have struck a visceral chord with the Japanese public, the US Forces’ devastating atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki closing the Second World War raw in the collective memory. Godzilla’s atomic breath and the hospitals crowded with victims of his radiation sickness were all too real to a population still navigating the country’s ruined debris in certain corners of the country’s post-imperial reset.
While bestowing high praise on the contemplative original and selected for his kaiju curated screening, Carpenter rounded off the movie marathon with the later Rodan, Ghidorah, and War of Gargantuas entries. But it was the darker debut that left the deepest impression on Carpenter when first witnessing the prehistoric behemoth on the silver screen all those years ago.
“I was cowering because I was just a little tyke,” Carpenter confessed. “Godzilla was very formidable at the time, that’s the original black and white. I was also fascinated because the effects were just so interesting and fabulous. Everything about it was great”.
