John Carpenter’s favourite horror movie of the 1950s
If anybody knows horror, it’s John Carpenter. The maestro of mayhem has given the genre some of its most cherished entries, from the sublime tension of The Thing to the bizarre surrealism of Christine to the criminally underrated The Fog. This is the guy who created Michael Myers. He could have retired after the first Halloween movie and still gone down in history as one of the greats.
When it comes to somebody like Carpenter, who’s made such a large impact on the world of cinema, people are naturally keen to discover his own personal tastes. Carpenter has admitted to being a fan of westerns, having grown up on the films of Howard Hanks and John Ford, as well as being a massive Godzilla nerd, but what about horror? What scary movies have made him shake in his boots?
When asked which era of horror he preferred, Carpenter answered with the 1950s, the decade in which he was a child and young teenager. “Movies then would scare the shit out of me,” he told Variety. “A famous example was the movie called The Fly, a Vincent Price movie from 1958 by 20th Century Fox. Kurt Neumann directed it. The Fly was a short story that appeared in Playboy”.
He added: “The scientist goes through a teleporter and mixes his atoms up with a fly, and the consequences are not good. His wife thinks that she’s found a way to cure it by sending him back through; she thinks it’s going to change the fact that he’s part fly. But when she rips off the hood that covered his head and there’s this giant fly head, boy, the popcorn went flying for me. I was up out of my seat. Such a great scare.”
The best-known incarnation of The Fly is arguably the 1986 version by David Cronenberg, starring Jeff Goldblum as the ill-fated inventor. In the 1958 version, David Hedison plays André Delambre, a French-Canadian scientist who accidentally transfers his head and arm to the body of a fly. Apart from the basic premise, the two films are almost entirely different. Cronenberg sees his victim desperately trying to fight the transformation into an insect, while Neumann’s protagonist is compromised from the start. The older plot revolves around Delambre’s family trying to track down the fly so he can be re-combined with it.
The original Fly was so successful that it spawned two sequels: Return of the Fly in 1959 and Curse of the Fly in 1965. Unfortunately, the series dramatically dwindled in quality after the original, as fewer cast and crew members returned with each subsequent instalment. It’s unclear how John Carpenter feels about them.
“Nowadays you look and it’s a little funky fly there, with a big fly head. But it was cool,” remarked the director on how much horror has changed since his younger days. “As we get older, you know what the dangers of life are about. They’re not under the bed. Let me just get this out of the way before you might ask it: What scares me the most is real life.”
Though it’s incredibly tame by today’s standards, the likes of The Fly are responsible for so many great horror movies from the 1970s and ’80s because the directors of those films grew up on this material. From relatively humble beginnings, these pictures gave way to the likes of Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, and Carpenter’s own catalogue of terrifying tales.
