The movies John Carpenter calls his “emotional favourites”
It’s always hard to name your favourite movies of all time. From all the countless films a person has watched over the years, whittling down the list into just a handful of watches is a nigh-on impossible task, but several have attempted it over the years. Of course, it can be easier to define what one means by a “favourite movie”, and that’s precisely what John Carpenter once did.
The legendary director of The Thing, The Fog, Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 once made the distinction between the kind of films that he learned his craft from – the ones of high technical quality – and the other kinds of cinematic works that he has a strong pull to, but from a more emotional basis.
“I have two different categories of favourite films,” Carpenter once explained in a feature with Rotten Tomatoes. “One is the emotional favourites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid. Anything you see in your formative years is more powerful because it really stays with you forever.”
Carpenter then went on to name five movies that he considers his “emotional favourites”, and looking at the selection, we can see the filmmaker’s passion for the horror and science fiction genres with which he would become professionally associated throughout his excellent career in the movie industry.
“When I was a kid, I loved The Curse of Frankenstein, The Creeping Unknown, X: The Unknown. I love Forbidden Planet, The Thing from Another World,” Carpenter said. “They were science fiction/horror movies, generally.” The Thing from Another World was famously remade by Carpenter into his iconic science fiction horror classic The Thing.
Elsewhere, we see his love for classic horror tales come shining through in the shape of The Curse of Frankenstein, while the likes of The Creeping Unknown and X: The Unknown both came from the UK in the 1950s. Forbidden Planet follows in the same vein and proves that Carpenter’s tastes pretty much lie where we’d expect them to.
“A lot of them were Hammer films, and the music in those movies,” Carpenter signed off. “One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my god… I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with… Well, again, when you’re young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.”
John Carpenter’s favourite emotional movies:
- The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957)
- The Creeping Unknown (Val Guest, 1955)
- X: The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956)
- Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)
- The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)
