“I love this one”: Kurt Russell on the best John Carpenter movie that John Carpenter didn’t direct
History has shown that trying to make a John Carpenter movie without John Carpenter at the helm will always fail to recapture the horror icon’s bespoke brand of lightning in a bottle, but there was one spiritual successor that left the director’s muse more impressed than the rest.
Hollywood has been obsessed with cannibalising the filmmaker’s back catalogue for years, and none of them can hold a candle to the originals. Some of them can’t even justify their existence, and the endless parade of Halloween sequels has only served to remind everyone that the original is untouchable.
Along with Michael Myers’ endless returns, audiences have also been gifted, or cursed, with fresh updates of The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Thing, while updated iterations of Big Trouble in Little China, Christine, Escape from New York, Starman, and They Live continue to threaten their way into existence.
It’s possible to channel the spirit of Carpenter and do it well, so long as it isn’t a blatant rehash. Adam Wingard’s The Guest, Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead are all great movies in their own right, and every one of them acknowledged the director’s influence and wore it proudly on their sleeve without ripping him off.
If there’s one person in Hollywood who knows what it takes to make a special John Carpenter movie better than anyone other than the man himself, it’s obviously Kurt Russell. The two became synonymous with cult classicism and B-tier greatness during their legendary partnership, which means he’s more qualified than most to comment on which spiritual successor cuts the mustard.
Having cited The Thing as a major influence on both Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight, jaws won’t be left on the floor by discovering that Quentin Tarantino was the auteur responsible, with Russell also managing to pat himself on the back by calling Death Proof the best non-Carpenter-helmed flick yet.
“I love this one,” he beamed. “I loved watching this one slowly make its ‘Carpenter climb’. It’s like Tarantino was talking to, I guess, [Robert] Rodriguez, and said, ‘Well, we wanted to make a John Carpenter movie’, and we did. And I said, ‘I told you, people won’t for 20 years really understand what you’re doing here.'”
2027 will mark the 20th anniversary of the failed Grindhouse experiment and the international release of Death Proof as a solo Tarantino flick, which means Russell is running out of time for his prophecy to come true. Is it a bad movie? Not especially, even if some sections do drag. It’s still the writer and director’s weakest feature-length effort by far, and two decades of time passing won’t change that.
Since he was the only person in Death Proof who spent years working with Carpenter, though, if Russell wants to say it’s the best spiritual successor to come along, then nobody’s really in a position to argue.
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