The greatest movies never made: John Carpenter’s ‘Shadow Company’
In the space of a dozen years, John Carpenter evolved from an untried and largely unknown filmmaker into one of genre cinema’s all-time greats, an incredible hot streak that’s right up there with the best runs any director has ever been on.
The snootier subset might turn their noses up at calling Carpenter’s 12-year stretch one of the greatest ever, but helming ten features – including Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live – between 1976 and 1988 secured his legacy.
At the peak of his powers, there was nobody better at melding the fantastical, supernatural, and the tongue-in-cheek better than Carpenter, and few have come close to matching him since. Unfortunately, that was about as good as it got, with the remainder of his directorial career failing to reach those heights unless anybody wants to die on the hill that Escape from LA is an underrated masterpiece.
However, there could have been one final flourish in that golden era, and it would have been Shadow Company. What’s more tantalising than the prospect of 1980s-vintage Carpenter taking the reins on a movie that follows a group of soldiers killed during the Vietnam War who end up being reanimated, rising from the grave, and attacking their hometown for no other reason than spite and vengeance on Christmas night? Good question.
Fortunately, there are also several very good answers. For one thing, Kurt Russell was being eyed for the lead role to reunite the blood-splattered dream team yet again. Secondly, the script had been written by screenwriting wunderkind Shane Black, who breathed new life into the buddy cop flick with Lethal Weapon.
Thirdly, Black had co-written the story with his friend and creative collaborator Fred Dekker. On his own, Dekker had penned and directed the bonkers cult favourite sci-fi horror comedy Night of the Creeps, and together, the pair had concocted another stone-cold cult gem, The Monster Squad. Last but not least, Walter Hill of The Warriors, 48 Hrs, Aliens, and Streets of Fire, was set to executive produce.
Just to lay everything out on the table: that’s Carpenter and Russell back together after Escape from New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China, putting their heads together to steer a wartime supernatural action thriller from the minds responsible for Lethal Weapon and The Monster Squad, with the director behind The Warriors and the executive producer of James Cameron’s Aliens involved.
Based on that intoxicating combination alone, Shadow Company was guaranteed cult status before a single frame had ever been shot. Sadly, a single frame was never shot, with the film never getting any further than the earliest stages of pre-production, robbing everyone of what was guaranteed to be another gonzo exercise in throwing caution to the wind and lobbing everything including the kitchen sink onto the screen.
To add injury to the insulting fact that it never happened, Black described it as existing somewhere between The Exorcist and Platoon, which is so nuts that it would have been incredible. 16 years after their deaths, the bodies of six American soldiers are discovered in a Cambodian temple and flown back to the States to be interred at a cemetery for veterans.
So furious at being betrayed by their country and shunned by their families for a war that society disavowed, the zombified sextet have no other goal in mind than leaving a trail of blood and body parts in their wake, regardless of whether they knew those victims in another life or not. Based on the premise and the sum of its parts, Shadow Company had the potential to take its place among the upper echelons of Carpenter’s filmography.
