John Carpenter names the western movie he could remake forever
After releasing two movies, Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13, John Carpenter would begin work on a film that would change cinema forever. Armed with a low budget – but plenty of ambition – the filmmaker crafted Halloween, a slasher that rewrote the horror subgenre’s rulebook. Until this point, slashers weren’t a massively popular subsection of scary movies, with titles like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas acting as the defining films of the emerging subgenre.
Yet, with Halloween, Carpenter drew from a range of influences, from these early slashers listed above to Italian giallos and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, creating a tale that was both gruesome, horrifying, and unsettling. For the first time, a slasher was taking place in a nice suburban area, with the masked killer, Michael Myers, targeting a group of teenagers without a strong motive. As Jamie Lee Curtis’ character, Laurie Strode, settles down for a night of babysitting, she is soon terrorised by Myers, who won’t stop until he has killed as many victims as he sets his sights on.
The film contained a point-of-view shot from the killer’s perspective in its opening sequence – a revolutionary move that truly placed the viewer in the action. We are then shown the killer standing outside the house with a bloody knife, revealing Myers as a child. This shocking reveal gives us Myer’s origin story and truly puts the audience on edge.
Since then, Carpenter has made many movies that have innovated the horror and sci-fi genres, such as The Thing, They Live, The Fog, and Escape From New York. The director has the ability to truly scare his audiences and leave them questioning their surroundings. His impact has been mammoth, but there came a time when Carpenter’s ideas were no longer working. From the 1990s onwards, most of Carpenter’s films have been received poorly at the box office and by critics, including In the Mouth of Madness and his remake of Village of the Damned.
In 2001, Carpenter experimented with a usual genre choice, blending sci-fi with western to create Ghosts of Mars. The cast was an odd choice, too, with the rapper Ice Cube appearing alongside Jason Statham and Pam Grier. It flopped, but it has since been considered a cult classic due to its particular weirdness. In an interview with Black Film, he discussed the film’s use of the western genre, with the publication asking if the film could be likened to Rio Bravo on Mars.
In response, the filmmaker gushed about his love of the Howard Hawks movie, stating, “You could look at it that way. My favourite western is Rio Bravo. I could remake that over and over.” Released in 1959 and featuring John Wayne, the film is one of the most acclaimed westerns, and Carpenter is one of many who consider it a favourite.
The film follows Wayne’s character, a sheriff who teams up with an unlikely group of people to ward off a gang after arresting a man. While Ghosts of Mars doesn’t exactly have the same plot—we witness a criminal and police officers fighting against possessed residents of a Mars colony—many fans noted the influence of Hawks’ work.
But that’s not the first time he’s been inspired by the film – it was one of his main inspirations when making Assault on Precinct 13, too.
