“I felt strange”: The moment Bong Joon-ho discovered ‘Dark Star’
John Carpenter is, without a doubt, one of the most important filmmakers in history. As well as horror classics like Halloween and The Thing, he also helmed the ship on Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. Oh, and he also provided incredible original music for most of his own films, just because he could.
This incredible run of form began in 1974 with a low-budget sci-fi comedy. Dark Star is set in a future where human beings are beginning to colonise space. The titular spaceship and its crew are sent out to destroy any unstable planets that might pose a threat to future missions, with various dangerous and hilarious consequences.
After toiling in relative obscurity for a number of years, Dark Star found an audience thanks to the advent of home video in the 1980s. It was shown in regular rotation on TV, which is where one future superstar director came across it for the first time.
In an interview with Film Comment, Bong Joon-ho described the moment he first encountered Carpenter’s earliest work. “I felt strange discovering it on TV,” the Korean auteur said. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” He said he was taken aback by how schlocky some of the special effects were, particularly “the so-called alien creature [which] is basically a rubber beach ball.” Regardless, he was utterly captivated, saying that “the film conveys an utterly unique atmosphere of outer space.” You can say that again.
Dark Star was among a number of “guilty pleasure” movies listed by Bong, who delivered an all-time great Oscar moment when Parasite won Best Picture in 2020. Also on the list was Killer Butterfly, a Korean supernatural drama, Pitch Black, a sci-fi horror that introduced the world to Vin Diesel’s Riddick character, and Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot, which is a miniseries rather than a movie, but we’ll make an exception just this once. He also discovered that one by flicking through the channels, calling it “the scariest vampire film I’ve ever seen”.
Carpenter’s debut began life as a student film, which he made alongside his friend Dan O’Bannon. Not only did O’Bannon write, edit, and star in the film, but Dark Star gave him his first taste of sci-fi. This would prove pivotal to his career. He was contacted to create the special effects for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s insane version of Dune, which famously never got made. Nevertheless, O’Bannon eventually got his chance to shine when Ridley Scott asked him to provide the script and effects for a little movie called Alien.
Bong isn’t the only famous director who has professed his love for this film. Quentin Tarantino called it “a masterpiece“. He even has a theory about what Dark Star helped to inspire. “They completely predate the jump to light speed in Star Wars. It’s obvious that George Lucas saw this and used the idea for lightspeed travel.”
