John Carpenter has a special type of hatred for 20th Century-Fox: “They engage in what’s called spite fucking”
The release of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 was a monumental moment for independent cinema, for while people had been scared by the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, Halloween followed in the footsteps of the grittier, more realistic slasher The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Yet, while Tobe Hooper’s movie took us to rural Texas, where a group of unfortunate teenagers stumble upon Leatherface’s secluded home, a museum of bones and corpses, Halloween did something much more terrifying by presenting the killer terrorising a pleasant-looking suburban neighbourhood with no apparent motive other than the fact that he loves breaking and entering.
Grossing $70million against a budget of around $300,000, the film changed horror forever, putting Carpenter on the map as a talented filmmaker who didn’t need a massive budget to make a hit. Clearly, the right narrative appeal of tapping into audiences’ most primal fears could work in spite of how much it costs.
Within a few years, Carpenter was getting offers to work with big production companies, and naturally, he took these chances, so while his follow-up films, The Fog and Escape from New York, were distributed by the indie company AVCO Embassy Pictures, his hit sci-fi horror The Thing saw him graduate to Universal Pictures.
Then, by the time he’d made Big Trouble in Little China, he was left feeling incredibly disillusioned by a certain big studio, and he refused to ever work with them again. In fact, it’s a topic that really gets the filmmaker fired up, because he couldn’t believe just how greedy and corrupt the film industry could be.
Of course, these days we’re all familiar with just how many secrets are lurking within Hollywood, where money-hungry executives are everywhere, but this is something that Carpenter had to discover for himself when he partnered up with 20th Century-Fox. He once revealed in Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews with Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics by George Hickenlooper, “[Dan] O’Bannon had a great quote about his experiences making Alien. It was the same studio I had worked for, 20th Century-Fox. I’ll try to paraphrase it: ‘Fox tried to do to me what prisoners do to each other in the prison yard’.”
Not holding back, Carpenter used sodomy to demonstrate just how brutal the huge corporation could be, adding, “It was a really terrible experience. I truly, deeply love the movie and had a great time making it. Unfortunately, I was trapped between a regime change and was caught in a lot of political turmoil with some folks who represent the new breed of executive in America.”
The experience of working with 20th Century-Fox was far from pleasant, marking a stark change from working independently, where greedy, suited executives were nowhere to be seen. “They engage in what’s called spite fucking,” Carpenter explained, “There’s a great deal of enjoyment in destroying people. I watched a lot of people around me destroyed. It’s pretty vicious.”
When asked if the company, which was taken over by news mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1985, just a year before the release of Big Trouble in Little China, cared about movies, the director was quick to answer, “No, not at all. They care about ‘your place!'”
