John Carpenter comments on the state of the modern horror genre
John Carpenter is a titan of the horror genre. Four years after the cult success of his 1974 film Dark Star, Carpenter made Halloween – a proto-slasher horror that made him practically synonymous with all things dread-inducing. Though it cost him only $300,000 to make, Halloween was a huge hit with audiences and wound up as one of the highest-earning independent movies of all time. Though no longer responsible for directing the Halloween films, Carpenter remains an important authority on the landscape of horror cinema. Here he opens up about the state of the genre.
Carpenter was been rather dismissive of modern horror in the past. When asked for his opinion on A24’s brand of elevated horror, the director simply responded: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Though clearly unimpressed by the likes of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, Carpenter did reveal an appreciation for the work of Tomas Alfredson.
When asked if he still gets scared by horror movies, he told The New Yorker: “No, I see the plumbing,” “You have to be young, young is good, and know a little less [to get scared]. But when a movie does affect me, that means it’s great because it’s gotten past all my sensors. There was a movie a few years ago I thought was just fabulous,” Carpenter continued. “It was called Let The Right One In. I believe that was a Swedish film. Oh, man, that was terrific. Just terrific. It just reinvented the vampire myth quite a bit. And I liked it.”
Since he made his last film, 2010’s The Ward, Carpenter has remained fairly detached from the film industry as a whole. There’s a sense that he views the modern horror industry with the same puritanical scepticism that made his early films so well-honed. When Rotten Tomatoes interviewed the director for his 70th birthday, he suggested that modern horror was just a little over-saturated. “There are so many horror films being made at all sorts of levels,” he said. “There are just so many of them. And I’m sure a bunch of them are really good. I just don’t take the time to find out.”
Still, Carpenter remains optimistic about the future of horror. During a conversation with Esquire in 2020, he argued that horror would always have a place in Hollywood. “Right from the beginning, from the early Universal horror movies—they were there during the Depression,” he said. “People flocked to them. Horror is always going to be with us.”
