The movie that scared John Carpenter the most
John Carpenter is a true master of the horror genre. He created the Halloween film franchise with the excellent first film released in 1978, a masterclass in chilling tension on a budget. Perhaps Carpenter’s best horror movie, however, is 1982’s The Thing, in which Kurt Russell is caught up in a battle against a mysterious lifeforce in the barren expanse of Antarctica.
During an interview from 1982 with Carpenter, when he was promoting The Thing, as well as other horror legends David Cronenberg and John Landis for the Fear on Film programme, Carpenter was simply asked: “What scares you?” Audiences might have been expecting the director to reveal some childhood inspiration behind his films, but he remained resolute in his bravado.
“I don’t get frightened by movies,” he said, with just a hint that he was hiding from something, shuffling up in his seat. “Movies don’t scare me, no,” he added. When Landis expressed his surprise at Carpenter’s macho claim, he backtracked and at least made the admission that some films did scare him when he was younger.
Carpenter then named the film that left the scariest mark on him as a boy. “The movie that scared me the most,” he said, wringing his hands together a little, “was probably It Came From Outer Space”. The movie was released in 1953 and tells of an amateur stargazer who spots a meteor hurtling towards the Earth. He finds its crash site and discovers a massive alien spaceship. Upon informing the authorities, though, he is dismissed as being mentally unstable.
Remembering the first time he saw the film, Carpenter continued: “It was in 3D; I was four years old. I was sitting near the front, and the meteor came out of the screen and blew up in my face. I jumped up and ran to the back and went, ‘Oh God, what was that?’ And I ran back down again.”
However, after that admission, Carpenter slunk back into his macho character. Asked whether the experience of watching It Came From Outer Space influenced his personal filmmaking style, the director merely said, “Nah” and shook his head, naturally drawing laughs from John Landis, loving every moment of Carpenter’s act.
From there, Carpenter went on to discuss The Thing, which had been based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella ‘Who Goes There?’. There had already been a film adaptation of the text in 1951 called The Thing from Another World, and Carpenter was asked to direct the remake by Universal Studios.
When Landis humorously asked if the 1951 film scared Carpenter, he admitted that “it was a chair lifter”, adding, “popcorn flew”. So while Carpenter wants us all to believe that he doesn’t get scared by films, there is evidently a part of him that does, and these slight admissions go to show that even the master of horror can get a spine-tingling chill in the cinema from time to time.
