The horror movies John Carpenter called “groundbreaking”
There are few masters in the realm of horror cinema quite like John Carpenter. Possessing the ability to captivate, spook and scare audiences with genuine suspense and horror, as well as write his own mesmerising yet haunting scores, Carpenter has been at the top of the horror game ever since Halloween was released back in 1978.
After showing the world the terrors of Michael Myers as he hunted down babysitter Laurie Strode, Carpenter cemented his position as one of horror’s all-time greats with follow-ups such as The Thing, The Fog and Prince of Darkness, showcasing his versatility as a director and writer.
During a 2014 phone interview with Roel Haanen, Carpenter was asked about how he embraced the style of traditional Hollywood with his films, while his horror contemporaries like Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg seemed to insist on reinventing the genre, aiming to deliver the shocks and scares in new ways.
Carpenter explained that the modernisation of horror began back in the 1960s, noting, “With George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. That was groundbreaking.” The 1968 independent horror movie by Romero starring Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea tells of seven people trapped inside a rural farmhouse in Pennsylvania as they are set upon by reanimated corpses.
Night of the Living Dead, made for just $100,000, is a seminal work in the realm of indie horror and is the film that popularised the zombie trope in pop culture. Grossing over $12million in the United States, Romero’s film, which he also photographed and edited himself, is one of the most profitable movies of all time.
The groundbreaking nature of horror does not end there for Carpenter, though, as he added, “Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre was groundbreaking. The thing about that movie, Texas Chain Saw, was that you never saw anything. It was all implied.”
1974 saw the release of Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow and Gunnar Hansen. It tells of a group of friends who encounter the perils of a family of bloodthirsty cannibals when they make a journey to visit an old homestead.
Explaining his feelings of innovation further and his position within the horror world, Carpenter said, “They were all experimenting on where they could take exploitation movies. I was always a child of Hollywood. I loved Hollywood movies; I loved old-fashioned Hollywood movies. I never lost my film school training and my love of old films. So you’re right about that. Absolutely right.”
