The monster movie John Carpenter always wanted to make: “I would if they asked me”
Every horror fan has their own Mount Rushmore of great directors, but the same names do crop up again and again. One individual whose face is routinely preserved in metaphorical stone is John Carpenter, the twisted mind behind some of the scariest and most influential spooky stories ever committed to film.
Carpenter has given life to all sorts of crazy and creepy monsters across his long career, including a possessed Plymouth Fury in Christine, the knife-wielding colossus Michael Myers in Halloween, and, perhaps his most gruesome creation, the shape-shifting titular alien from The Thing. That’s not bad going, but if you ask the man himself, there’s one creature he’s desperate to work with.
When speaking to HeyUGuys in 2011, Carpenter was asked if he would ever make a big monster movie. His response was, “I would if they asked me. I’d love to make a Godzilla movie.” The giant radioactive lizard has played a big part in Carpenter’s life, as he’s routinely spoken about his love for the series and how much it affected him growing up as a film-obsessed child. One of his earliest known works was a short film called Godzilla vs. Gorgo, which pitted the Japanese monster against a British copycat. Alas, the movie, which was made using stop motion, has been lost to time.
The legendary director, who also made The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live, to name but a few, has made no effort to hide his kaiju obsession in recent years. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, he named the original 1954 original (called “Gojira” in Japan) as his favourite Godzilla movie. When asked if he’d been secretly working on a Godzilla script, he replied, “No, no, no, they know what they’re doing. But I met the head of Toho: he came to visit me. He wanted me to do [a remake of] Matango, but I wasn’t ready to do it.”
Toho Co. Ltd. is a Japanese entertainment company who has been working on Godzilla since the very start and are still responsible for distributing its movies. Matango is a 1963 Japanese horror film about a group of people who end up cast away on a desert island and fall foul of a strain of mutated mushroom.
Before he got onto his favourite topic, Carpenter was speaking to HeyUGuys to promote his new movie, The Ward. Starring Amber Heard, Danielle Panabaker, and Jared Harris, The Ward follows a young woman in a mental institution who is being haunted by the ghost of a former inmate. This was Carpenter’s first movie in nine years and he was asked why he had taken such a long break.
“I was seriously considering not making movies again,” he said. “They were too hard, they weren’t fun. I think that my last film tanked didn’t help things at all. So I thought, I don’t know, maybe it’s time to quit.” His previous film had been Ghosts of Mars, which had indeed flopped at the box office.
Even though he has seemingly stepped away from actively directing – he hasn’t made a movie since The Ward – Carpenter remains involved in the world of horror. He served as an executive producer on the recent trilogy of Halloween reboots, in addition to contributing to their scores alongside his son Cody. He also still cares deeply about Godzilla, tweeting in 2024, “Incredible! GODZILLA MINUS ONE wins an Academy Award for special effects. In my lifetime. Fantastic!”
