How John Carpenter struggled with early comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock: “Oh dear, I can’t live up to that”
Almost every filmmaker dreams of being spoken of in the same breath as Alfred Hitchcock because he’s one of the all-time greats. However, direct comparisons can be a much trickier thing to navigate, which stirred up an early existential crisis in John Carpenter.
As the architect behind many of cinema’s finest thrillers, nobody knew how to manipulate an audience quite like the ‘Master of Suspense’. In all of his best movies, he’s got the viewers wrapped around his thumb, lulling them into a false sense of security before pulling the rug from right underneath them, sometimes doing it more than once over the course of a single picture.
There’s a reason why Hitchcockian has been part of the lexicon for so long, and while there’s never been anyone to emulate a true original, Carpenter burst onto the scene and quickly found that albatross hanging around his neck. He didn’t ask for it, but once some things are spoken aloud, they can never be unsaid.
Comedic sci-fi Dark Star and action thriller Assault on Precinct 13 didn’t immediately evoke Hitchcock comparisons, but Halloween did. It was intense and atmospheric, punctuated by jarring musical cues and shocking imagery, and anchored by a female lead pitted against an opposing force she’s ill-equipped to handle. Superficial it may have been, but unnoticed it was not.
Matters weren’t helped by Hitchcock’s direct influence on Carpenter when he was crafting Halloween, never mind Psycho star Janet Leigh’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis taking centre stage. He didn’t bring it upon himself, but it nonetheless created mixed emotions for the filmmaker when he was still in the formative stages of his career.
“Well, it was nice,” he admitted to Roel Haanen.”But then they started awaiting the new Hitchcock movie, and that’s not what I wanted to do. I was not Hitchcock. I was a student of his work in cinema, but I was already a very different director. So it was a mixed bag. Of course, it’s wonderful to be compared to a director, but it also comes with a little bit of expectation. And you think, ‘Oh dear, I can’t live up to that.'”
It quickly became clear through Halloween follow-ups The Fog, Escape from New York, and The Thing that Carpenter had no intention of trying to be Hitchcock. Instead, he was carving out a reputation for himself as one of genre cinema’s most reliably accomplished purveyors. Horror, fantasy, and sci-fi were his preferred avenues, with straightforward thrillers in a vein similar to the ‘Master of Suspense’ not even entering his mind.
Sometimes, the best way to avoid being compared to one thing is to do the exact opposite, an approach that served Carpenter very well as he became one of genre cinema’s most popular auteurs.
